Artist Statement

My documentary portrait photography series of assembly line workers from the Smithfield Foods factory located in Junction City consists of 21 prints of varying sizes. Five prints are 40” x 50” in. and 16 are 12” x 14” in displayed in a grid. When the viewer enters the installation, they are confronted with five larger-than-life-sized portraits of the Smithfield factory worker’s portraits. The viewer might expect to observe an essence of individuality in these photographs however, they are left with a black-and-white, deliberately neutral deadpan portrait. The portraits are photographed in the 4 x 5 format and therefore show the pores of the laborers, with each portrait being proportionately scaled to the size of the human body. Moving further into the exhibition the viewer can see the same photographs of the laborers extracted away from the context of the workplace environment, placed in a studio setting. Here we see the workers from a wider perspective showing their whole body in uniform and meat gathered from the factory. My photographs communicate both dignity and hardship in labor and an understanding of social and economic situations that are present in a factory workplace. By printing the images so large, I am drawing attention to the individual worker. Like August Sander and with a nod to Lewis Hine, I am also attempting to document them in their uniforms.

I have been an assembly line worker with Smithfield since the summer of 2020. While working the third shift, I felt stripped of my personality and creativity due to exhaustion and lack of human interaction. This disconnection and alienation from the world significantly decreased my creativity and impacted my emotional state and I became stressed. My interest in photographing the working class comes from watching my single mother work at Advanced Auto Parts warehouse to provide for our family of seven. After high school, I followed a similar path to that of my mother by working at Mahaska Bottling Company and Smithfield Foods, where I pursued different positions in the warehouse. Statistics provided by the Center for Economic and Policy Research state that people of color, immigrants, and people in relatively low-income families are disproportionately employed in meatpacking plants with 44.4 percent of meatpacking workers being Hispanic and 25.2 percent being Black. This is a world that many do not see I will continue to document factory work in the United States.