The sun showed no mercy, yet the asparagus workers kept bending, squatting and digging as if their lives depended on it.
Irving Villegas, a freelance photographer from Mexico City, had spotted them toiling in the fields of Weiterstadt, Germany — about 20 miles south of Frankfurt — in the summer of 2007, when he happened to be living nearby. He approached them, curious.
All hailed from other countries; Poland and Romania, mostly. In classic migrant-worker tradition, after the picking season they would go home or move on to the next country. Also traditional: the lousy pay, 27 to 57 cents per kilogram of asparagus. As Mr. Villegas chatted with the workers, taking photos with no particular end in mind, one scene, one image, “marked” him.
The photo captures a group of workers in an asparagus field, bare-chested in the blistering heat, with one in the foreground stripped down to his briefs. It demonstrates the grit and determination of these laborers, who put in 10-hour days, seven days a week, no matter what, all season long. The photo also touches the viewer and raises questions.
“Since that photo,” Mr. Villegas said, “a concern for those people started, a wanting to know more about them.”
Six years later, Mr. Villegas used that image to begin “Working Far Away,” which documents the public and private lives of seasonal workers in several countries and continents. He has followed asparagus workers in several towns in Germany and found their families in towns and cities in Romania. He has also documented Polish sheep shearers and olive workers from Morocco, Senegal and other countries working in several towns in Spain. Next on his list: France and Finland.
It took six years to start the project, said Mr. Villegas, who lives where he studied photography, in Hannover, to establish himself. “I needed to start a life in Germany,” he said. “So I set aside that topic but always with that photo in my mind, knowing one day I would pick up the subject.”
Photographers have been documenting the plight of seasonal workers for decades. Yet any attention the workers receive tends to be quickly forgotten. Immigrant workers, especially, who leave their countries for backbreaking work that few in the host countries is willing to do, remain in society’s peripheral vision. At best, they’re ignored. At worst, they’re vilified as criminals. “Working Far Away” aims to dispel the stereotypes.
“I think that mainly I aim to shatter that idea of ‘We don’t need immigrants in our country, they steal our job opportunities,’ ’’ Mr. Villegas said. “For instance, in Germany, there are few locals that apply for the asparagus season. For them it represents a big physical effort that is not worth the payment. That’s why there are only immigrants in the fields.”
The seasonal workers in Spain are having a harder time. The country’s recession has led desperate local residents to take farm jobs they once shunned. A striking image of a Senegalese worker, drenched in sweat, as he hauls nets used for olives in Jaen reminds us that luck is relative. This worker, the father of three girls, has managed to secure a contract during the harvest for eight years.
The unluckiest brave the long and dangerous journey to Spain only to find the work no longer exists. One man sits at a train terminal, saddled with bags and luggage and weariness as he waits for uncertainty in the next town.
“Working Far Away,” Mr. Villegas expects, will take years to complete.
“Seasonal workers are everywhere,” he said, “and my original purpose was to document as many countries as I could in different continents. But one thing at a time. This is a very difficult project to carry out, financially speaking.”
He plans spend to finish the European part of the project by the end of this year. Then, “ideally,” he said, “I would like to continue in America.”
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