Before the film, C?sar Chavez, Chavez's?life was depicted in photographs?by his confidant, Jon Lewis.
In the winter of 1966, twenty-eight-year-old ex-marine?Jon Lewis visited Delano, California, the?center of the California grape strike. He thought he might stay awhile, then resume studying photography at San Francisco State University. He stayed for two years, becoming the United Farm Workers Unions semiofficial photographer and a close confidant of farmworker leader C?sar Ch?vez.
Surviving on a pickets wage of five dollars a week, Lewis photographed twenty-four hours a day and created an insiders view of the historic and sometimes violent confrontations, mass marches, fasts, picket lines, and boycotts that forced the table-grape industry to sign the first contracts with a farm workers union. Though some of his images were published contemporaneously, most remained unseen. Historian and photographer Richard Steven Street rescues Lewis from obscurity, allowing us for the first time to see a pivotal moment in civil rights history through the lens of a passionate photographer.
A masterpiece of social documentary, this work is at once the biography of a photographer, an expos? of poverty and injustice, and a celebration of the human spirit.
![Jon Lewis: Photographs of the California Grape Strike [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/7/1/2/2_44276.jpg "Jon Lewis: Photographs of the California Grape Strike [Hardcover]")