African Farm Workers Blend With Their Tools in Pictures – Wired

Ask anyone where the produce in their fridge came from and they’ll probably tell you the name of a supermarket. The literal and figurative distance between farmers and the consumers who rely upon them is more than any localvore app or neighborhood co-op can hope to change. It’s easy to forget the crucial human link in the supply chain from farm to market.

Jackie Nickerson’s Terrain series aims to make that link. Her portraits of farm workers in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, and Kenya show the laborers as one with their produce and tools.

“Every photo in the series is actually a part of working life,” says the Boston-born, UK-raised photographer, who visited some 100 farms for the project across 20 trips. “The images become quite theatrical and I didn’t want to trivialize one of the central themes of the work. Every photo in the series is actually a part of working life. This is not just spectacle, a performance. The guys were helping me make images that are grounded in the everyday.”

The series has been a long time coming. Living in Zimbabwe from ’96 to ’01, Nickerson started photographing workers at the farm where she lived early on. It was a way of addressing the country’s post-colonial hangover that she felt created a gulf separating her from the people right next door. That feeling is understandable–farming in Zimbabwe is a divisive and, quite literally, black and white issue–and Nickerson grew interested in the profound interdependencies between farmers, land, produce and power. Though long fascinated by the issue, Nickerson didn’t start shooting Terrain until 2012.

“It was important for me to get a personal perspective of the reality of the situation on the ground,” she says. “I wanted to try to collapse political borders and concentrate on the wider issue of agricultural labor and the agrarian environment, because it’s always these guys that end up paying the price for any political turmoil.”

By obscuring the farmers among their produce and tools, Nickerson visually abstracts them into the very things that provide their livelihoods. The initial idea for the style of  Terrain struck Nickerson while watching the farmers at work, when a man named Oscar turned in a certain way while carrying his load.

While the results are visually striking and beautiful, it violates standard rules of portraiture. In many cases the subject’s face isn’t visible, and often the human form itself is difficult to make out. More traditional portraits and landscapes are also included in the series, but Nickerson’s real inspiration came from this visual interplay.

“It’s about the relationship between people and their working environment and the hybrid that is created by the physical contact with what they work with,” she says. “The daily grind where movements must be repeated thousands and thousands of times over. It creates a deep familiarity with the tools and materials they are working with–earth, landscapes, plants, plastics.”

In 2000, under president Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe underwent a controversial (and often violent) redistribution campaign to return white-owned farms to black Zimbabweans. For better or worse, it echoed an ongoing continent-wide refutation of colonial apartheid.

Many of the now-resettled farms harvest tobacco, a crop that saw production sharply decline in the past decade. The cigarette industry has invested heavily in revitalizing it, leading to programs that help prop up fledgling farms and create networks between them.

These networks would prove useful Nickerson. She contacted friends of friends, various organizations and farmers unions, travel companies. Some of the farmers she visited were commercial, some were farming for subsistence. In each case, she had to explain her purpose for being there, and spent enough time with them to understand their operation–often, she used her previous photos to illustrate what she was going for.

“I was aware that this had to be a process of re-creation rather than creation,” she says, referencing the balance the portraits strike between being documentary and staged.

Nickerson also sees a power dynamic at play in portraiture, one in which she wants to ensure the person being photographed is given the higher ground. That power and responsibility also extends outside of the photographic event, and into the wider world where the photo gets seen.

“When I was in Mozambique in 1997, I saw an amazing looking woman by the roadside and asked her if I could take her picture,” Nickerson says. “I usually have a whole conversation but this lady was waiting for a bus so I had to be quick. She said “I don’t want you to take my picture because you’re just going to show the world how poor we are and we don’t feel like that.”

Her previous project, called Farm, was also a portraiture series of African farmers, and another series called Ten Miles Round dealt with the connection between people and their land in rural Ireland. Her work is suffused with these themes, and in this series she is addressing directly the cause and effect, the chain of relationships that connect the farmers to their customers.

“I think Africa is bracketed by two exaggerated images: urban squalor and rural wildness. I am trying to disrupt this commonplace assumption,” she says, “And make images that might make us think about the value of labor and give an insight into the people who are growing our food.”

All photos: Jackie Nickerson