Photographer and author Richard Steven Street presents his lecture, "Photographer's Double: The Historian as Photographer, the Photographer as Historian," at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm in Norman.
The two-screen slide lecture describes the process Street used to sort through 10,000 images while selecting a cover for his 2004 book, "Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California." His presentation goes through a 150-year visual journey of the lives of California farm workers and their lasting impact on American visual culture.
Street said his work as a photographer gave him an unusual channel for collecting information on this unique class of people.
"I trained as an academic historian and spent the last 25 years as a commercial photographer submerged in the industry," he said. "I used that as a vehicle for mounting a massive research project. I used all the encounters with border patrol and the growers to scrape up large amounts of data that a scholar wouldn't normally accumulate in the normal process of academic research. So you're going to get the visual history of a class of people from the earliest photograph to the present."
Admission to the lecture is free. A reception and book signing will follow in the museum's Sandy Bell Gallery. For more information, call 325-3272.
"?James Lovett
