UC Berkeley
business student wins Dorothea Lange fellowship for photos taken
in Mission District
17
Jan 2001
By
Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations
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"Dreams,"
Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco 2000
Peter
Lemieux photo
(More
photos
are available on the Dorothea Lange Fellowship web site.)
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Berkeley
- A University of California, Berkeley, graduate student is
this year's winner of the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, awarded
for his photos of migrant workers in San Francisco's Mission
District and his plans to further spotlight their lives and
the roles they play in the American economy.
Peter Lemieux,
30, receives $4,000 to finance a photographic expedition back
to the Mission District. There he plans to document the lives
of urban migrant workers from the first morning light through
their day jobs and into their after work hours.
The award
was announced today (Wednesday, Jan. 17) by UC Berkeley's
Office of Public Affairs, which administers the fellowship.
The fellowship
is awarded to a UC Berkeley faculty member, graduate student,
or to an undergraduate senior accepted for graduate work at
UC Berkeley who demonstrates outstanding work in documentary
photography and a creative plan for future work. Lemieux is
a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
Dorothea
Lange was known for her landmark photographic work documenting
farm families migrating West in search of work during the
Depression. She worked with her second husband, Paul S. Taylor,
who was a UC Berkeley professor and labor economist.
As a tribute
to his wife, Taylor established the fellowship at UC Berkeley
in 1981, a decade and a half after Lange's death. The first
award was given in 1982.
Lemieux's
project looking at urban migrant workers struggling to make
it in the midst of Northern California's glitzy dot.com world
- teetering on the edge of an economic downturn - offers an
intriguing echo of Lange's work.
"Lange
would be incredibly proud. The connections (to her work) are
so perfect here," said Matthew Lyon, UC Berkeley's assistant
vice chancellor of Public Affairs. "She was studying migrants,
and Peter Lemieux is studying urban migrants in the West.
And, he has the ability that few documentarians have, which
is to take this work to a higher level and make it art."
Lyon described
Lemieux's photos as "visually compelling. This is a photographer
who has the eye of an artist. But it's also married to the
socially conscious intelligence of a true documentarian or
sociologist."
The slight
and soft-spoken Lemieux, who earned bachelor's degrees in
French and public policy from Duke University, said the urban
migrant worker has been overlooked by the media in favor of
farm laborers.
"All across
America, these groups of (urban) migrants...roof, paint, landscape,
construct and re-construct urban America each day and do so
with no workers' rights, sporadic employment and zero gratitude,"
the second-year student in the Haas School's MBA program wrote
in his fellowship application.
In their
pursuit of the American Dream, he wrote, they live on the
streets and in shelters, cramped studio apartments or itinerant
hotels. They eat free meals at churches, feed the pigeons,
search for work, abuse drugs, listen to the radio or read
the Bible.
"But no
matter the differences in how these migrant workers go about
their lives," Lemieux wrote, "the massive wealth-creating
dot.com frenzy - represented on bus and billboard advertisement,
in hip new cafes sprouting up and by trendy twenty-something
techies darting to and from their offices just blocks away
- provides a stark contrast to this reality."
Lecturer
Mimi Chakarova recommended Lemieux for the Lange award, having
become acquainted with him in her documentary photography
course at the campus's Graduate School of Journalism. "I am
convinced that Peter shares Dorothea Lange's compassion and
dedication to make a difference in communities that at times
are forgotten by the rest of the world," she said in her letter
of recommendation.
Lemieux
founded a humanitarian organization to help isolated communities
in the Amazon and worked for various relief organizations
in Asia and Latin America, recording on film the work he witnessed
and managed overseas.
He said
he came to UC Berkeley to earn a business degree and to explore
the campus's documentary and photojournalism programs.
"I want
to explore social venture opportunities that can positively
impact our world," Lemieux said. "This demands business savvy."
And maybe a camera lens.
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Links:
Dorothea
Lange Fellowship web site (includes slide show of Lemieux's
photos)
Haas
School of Business
.
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