A recent photography exhibition documenting public marches, protests, rallies, and demonstrations features photographs from Vera Chang, a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and a member of professor Alastair Iles’ lab.
Three of Chang’simages were showcased in the Picturing Resistance exhibition at the Art Intersection gallery in Gilbert, Arizona. The show was curated by photojournalist Ken Light, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and runs through October 22, 2022.
Chang’s photos follow the formation and ongoing efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ worker-driven social responsibility model, a human rights movement that challenges the paradigm of worker exploitation in corporate supply chains. The photographs connect with Chang’s ongoing doctoral research, which focuses on the ways systems can be made safer, healthier, and fairer for the people who pick, pack, and process food. Her photography chronicles how farmworkers are reshaping agriculture through their farmworker-led human rights movement.
Three of Chang’s images of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers were showcased in the Picturing Resistance exhibition at the Art Intersection gallery in Gilbert, Arizona.
“Our pictures reinsert marginalized workers to bend history toward justice,” Chang wrote in her artist statement. “In a time saturated with distressing news, these photos convey how rank-and-file immigrant workers are knowledgeable actors building momentum to claim their rights. They also are a historical resource of a human rights model expanding into other industry sectors.”
A National Science Foundation Fellow and a winner of the 2018 Rachel Tanur Prize for Visual Sociology, Chang’s writing on social, agricultural, and environmental issues has appeared in Civil Eats, the Guardian, and Bitch. She collaborates with the Berkeley Food Institute on research on labor conditions in commercial farming and was recently a Fellow with Solutions Journalism Network, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Clif Bar Foundation.
Watch a full video of the Picturing Resistance exhibition at the Art Intersection gallery’s website.