Photography and the Western Worker: Organizing Farm Labor in Early 1930s California

Ellen Macfarlane is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her research is focused on modern art and the history of photography, with a particular concentration on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in the U.S., 1890–1945. Ellen’s dissertation, “Seeing Plus: The Photography of Group f.64,” has received support from The American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Huntington Library. Her new research on Western Worker is the basis for a second book-length project about the photographic aesthetics of U.S. radical periodicals from 1920 to 1934.