“Between 1994 and 2001, the endowment of Harvard University tripled, making the school the wealthiest non-profit in the world, second only to the Vatican. In the same years, Harvard heavily outsourced many service jobs to lower-paying companies, thus resulting in average wage cuts of 30% for the schools’ custodians, food-workers and security guards.
In response, I got involved with a student group called the Harvard Living Wage Campaign and I began this project. My goal was to publicize the situation, to share the stories of a number of service-workers I had come to know, and to raise questions about the prevailing class-structure at Harvard and on college campuses in general.” Gregory Halpern
If you’re not aware of the work of Gregory Halpern (which I wasn’t until a week ago), then please, please, please spend some time reading Asim Rafiqui’s account of his work here, and then spend some time with the photographs here.
I do want to add one thing.
Too often we celebrate the photographer and not the cause. It’s a kind of disease in an industry where very few people are prepared to challenge unless the gods be shaken and they feel their wrath. That’s stone age thinking, because there are no gods, only emperors who have clambered up the pack of cards (often through great work) and whom our adulation clothes.
It says nothing about photography and everything about us that we are only interested in a ’cause’ when a ‘name’ photographer is attached.
Halpern, like Rodriguez, like Crow, like White, like Chiba, like Rafiqui (see our Where It’s At Links) are only interested in one voice being heard, and that voice is never their own. That’s why we celebrate their work.
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