Ken Light

I take a number of different approaches to my photography. Sometimes I’m the fly on the wall. Sometimes I have a stronger relationship with the subject. Sometimes it’s a formal portrait. But it’s always with an eye towards storytelling. I’ll always go into a project with a story in mind, but in the end, I prefer to let the photographs dictate the story. 

This image emerged from a farm workers series I did, which took about four and a half years. I was travelling all over the country. The Department of Agriculture actually has harvest maps that show you when harvests are happening in different regions. So it’s fairly straightforward to know where migrant workers will be on any given week. I would ask the farm and orchard owners for permission, and then head out into the fields.

Ken is an American photographer based in Orinda, CA.

I wasn’t looking for pregnant migrant workers. It was a part of a larger series on agricultural labor. But coming across this pregnant woman picking apples was quite surprising. It’s tough work—backbreaking labor, pesticides on the trees—it seemed implausible for her to be out there in her condition. 

She was happy to be photographed. One of the greatest challenges in my work is building the trust necessary to capture someone honestly. Many people—and this is understandably very much the case for undocumented immigrants—are initially suspicious of a man with a camera. 

But the people that I photograph are so underrepresented in American culture, that when I come and take a genuine interest in their lives, they’re almost always open to allowing me to photograph them. Building that trust is essential. 

Going in to photograph agricultural workers, you know you’re going to find things that are unseen—children working in the fields, low pay, poor living conditions. But until that day, I hadn’t seen many pregnant women working in the fields. She had the classic pregnant glow around her—and I hope that comes through in the photograph—but here she was in the midst of this backbreaking labor. It was such a striking juxtaposition.