Photographer Brian Frank captures the faith and fortitude of migrant workers in the
THE
EDEN
PROJECT
Central Valley with his series, “East of Eden.”
“It blew up my worldview in a couple of ways,” he tells The Rooted Journal. “I was trying to highlight the injustice going on south of the border. Guess what? The same thing was going on actually north of the border, too. I didn’t know that until I started photographing it.” Frank’s work has been published in National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, but he’s hoping to share “East of Eden” in the Central Valley community. The series is split into three chapters, exploring the journey migrant workers make from Latin America to the U.S. and their connections to faith. Frank’s subjects are the same communities that Steinbeck wrote about in “The Grapes of Wrath,” a story that Frank feels is surprisingly relevant today, more than 80 years after the novel was published in 1939. “The work is still the same. The struggles are still the same,” he says. “In some ways, the struggles are worse now for this community because they also have to worry about getting taken from their families and deported.” Ahead, Frank discusses his years embedded with the migrant communities of the Central Valley and the challenges faced by migrant farmers today.
M
ORE THAN 70 YEARS AGO, John Steinbeck wrote: “There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty.”
Photographer Brian Frank knows that well. For the better part of two decades, Frank has been documenting the “dreadful beauty” of migrant communities both north and south of the border. His current project, “East of Eden” — named for the 1952 Steinbeck novel from which the quote is taken — captures the lives of migrant communities in California’s Central Valley. After graduating from San Francisco State University with a journalism degree, Frank went on to document farm workers in Latin America for several years. He was drawn back north after realizing that many of the struggles farmers faced there were also being felt by migrant farmers in the U.S.
Workers pick stone fruit on a day choked by wildfire smoke in the Valley.
by Julie Gerstein
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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ISSUE 01
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