Jim Kasson’s tribute to Salinas Valley
farm workers wins national prize
Equipped: Kasson and his 4×5 Linhof Technika.
Photo by Rob Fisher
It all started with a picture. A landscape, photographed through the window of a moving car. Some images were clear, others blurred, with directional distinction. Fascinated, Jim Kasson was determined to figure out how it was achieved.
For 18 months, Kasson stared at that photograph, the engineer in him piecing together a process that would have created the composition, while the artist appreciated the effects. In the end, he pulled out his 4×5 Linhof Technika camera and began making his own. Kasson eventually applied the technique to create a series of photos of Salinas Valley farm workers, which he called This Green Growing Land. A collection of the striking photos appeared in the inaugural issue of Edible Monterey Bay in Fall 2011. In March, the photo essay received the top non-cover photography prize in the 2012 national “EDDY” Excellence in Publishing Awards made by Edible Communities, the family of magazines of which Edible Monterey Bay is a member. The award was one of 20 editorial prizes for which 70 Edible magazines were under consideration.
The farm worker photos are reminiscent in style of impressionist paintings, both in their soft, abstracted beauty and in their elevation of often overlooked and taken-for-granted subjects.
“The selective blurring and muted colors render the workers anonymous, making the images less a portrayal of a particular time and place, and more an archetype…but the emphasis is on the workers and their relationship to the land and to the machinery,” Kasson wrote in an artist’s statement for the series.
Kasson took the photographs from a moving car, exposing the negatives at slow shutter speeds and using panning to emphasize some parts of the scene and to blur others. He printed the images on heavy paper with a color palette similar to that of pastels. The Stanford-educated electrical engineer, who spent most of his career with Hewlett-Packard, Rolm and IBM, began photographing in earnest for his high school yearbook and, later, The Stanford Chaparral humor magazine. Later, in 1980, Kasson took a threemonth hiatus from work, built himself a dark room, bought a Hasselblad camera and got serious. Most of his earlier work was traditional, silver-based, black-and-white photography.
Today, Kasson relies on digital editing and printing processes, and he has moved away from using slow-motion photography techniques to create the blurred images he is after. Recently, he’s been compiling a body of work in a new, “staccato” style.
“I decided to come up with a different way of doing this,” Kasson says. “I learned how by inventing it. Each picture is a composite of some eight to 20 photographs taken within seconds of one another. I determine what is sharp and what is blurred by the way I line up the pictures when I overlay them.”
“I like to experiment,” Kasson explains. “My photography is all about coming up with an idea and not knowing how it will turn out, but playing with it until I do know. It is a lot like engineering — both technical and creative. In engineering, elegance is also important, an idea I value in photography as well.”
To view Kasson’s work, go to kasson.com; to see the winning photo essay here.
Editor’s note: In addition to receiving the EDDY award for Kasson’s photo essay, Edible Monterey Bay was one of three finalists for EDDY Awards for Excellence in Publishing in the category of “Best Editorial— Beverage-Focused,” for “On the Vine, Grahm’s Gamble,” by Kurt Foeller (Edible Boston took home the prize) and “Best Editorial—New Column Creation” for “The Preservationist,” by Jordan Champagne of Happy Girl Kitchen Co. (Edible Manhattan won the honor). We congratulate our talented contributors and fellow publishers for this well deserved recognition!
About the author
A fifth-generation Northern Californian, Lisa Crawford Watson has enjoyed a diverse career in business, education and writing. She lives with her family on the Monterey Peninsula, where her grandmother once lived and wrote. An adjunct writing instructor for CSU Monterey Bay and Monterey Peninsula College, Lisa is also a free-lance writer, who specializes in the genres of art & architecture, health & lifestyle, food & wine. She has published various books and thousands of feature articles and columns in local and national newspapers and magazines.
