This past weekend I spent some time down on the Monterey Peninsula. I used to travel to Carmel, Pacific Grove and Monterey fairly often for business. My favorite part of the trip was not the destination, but the getting-there part, driving quietly through what I called Steinbeck Country: Salinas, Castroville, Watsonville. Watching the pink-gold morning light slant across fields of artichokes or brussels sprouts. Seeing delicate looking helicopters that looked just like overgrown dragonflies hovering over rows of green berry plants. Roadside pickup trucks proclaiming whatever they were selling in neon tempera signs: 7 for $1! 10 for $1!
Overshadowed by their more prestigious, tourist-friendly seaside neighbors, these are the towns where people really do still live close to the land, producing the crops that we have come to take for granted in our local markets.
This is a field of strawberries in the making, protected from the January cold by plastic sheeting.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, and a million more yesses…
I would have to agree with Donald. Loving the composition and vignetting on this photo. It speaks to the story you want to tell.
hey julie, i’ve really been thinking about this- the photo is lovely, but the accompanying text has been rubbing at me, and i’ve decided i have to respond. i also travel to this area a lot and lived in watsonville and santa cruz for 2 years. people do work on the land, mostly migrant and undocumented immigrants. but very few people actually own the land they work- almost all of the area, the central valley, and really, all of america’s farms are owned by giant companies that don’t really give a shit about the land in terms of the local. the towns, the people there, they mostly work in the service industry, or in other low wage jobs, very very few people are actually farmowners.
i spent lots of my childhood in very close proximity to artichoke fields. not organic ones, but crop dusted ones. you’re totally right- we need to have an awareness of the farms- we wouldn’t have strawberries, lots of people wouldn’t have strawberries, or garlic or artichokes- without that area. but i just have been thinking a lot about the description and how really, it’s not all sunshine and… strawberries 
and those helicopters may look delicate and photogenic (they do!), but they’re spraying nasty pesticides, that sometimes i blame for my weirdness
hope you’re not too offended by this!
lauren
Lauren, I’m not offended by your comment and you do bring up an interesting point. I feel that the purpose of CALIBER is to highlight photos we’ve taken (and the photos of others through our Flickr pool) that we feel are exemplary. The thrust of the site is photography, and all other things are secondary, including writing. Expository text is the handmaiden to the image and I think we try to be as brief and concise as possible.
When I posted this photo, I was trying to capture the essence of what I was seeing in a very literal sense. My description, for better or worse, was an accurate picture of several snapshots of an early morning drive. My head is not totally in the clouds: I am well aware of the issues that migrant workers face, as well as the implications that those dragonfly looking helicopters pose. However, I do try to keep my personal politics out of this blog as much as possible, as I don’t wish it to interfere with the appreciation of the image that I have chosen to present. I would rather post an image and let people come to their own conclusions without my assistance.
To that end, I do try to keep my political, philosophical and other musings here to a minimum and reserve what is strongly on my mind in more detail on my written blog, tangobaby.
John Steinbeck lived and wrote about this same land that was and continues to be plagued by the same problems that you discuss in your comment. However, what I wanted most of all was to share an image that I felt captured the feeling of the place as I saw it at a precise time and place.
thanks for hte reply, julie, and glad you took it well, better than i laid it out, probably.
my thoughts on your thoughts- i totally understand that your blog is about the pictures. my feeling, though, is that visual art is, to use some of your words, political, and philosophical, and adding text to it only makes it more so. i know i am more sensitive to this because these issues are ones i care about, and the monterey bay and the bay area are areas i care deeply about,
when i see (literally) those fields when i drive by, and see your picture, literally, these are the issues that are raised for me- one of the points of art, is to raise emotions, right? at caliber, i feel like lots of the photography is provocative, which is awesome. the text, though, jarred with the image and the emotions that were evoked, which made me feel uncomfortable enough to speak up.