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FOCUS Photography Festival
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Irving Villegas (b. 1982, Mexico) is a photographer currently based in Hannover, Germany. In 2005 he started to collaborate with national and international newspapers, news-photo agencies and NGOs including Der Spiegel, La Cronica de Hoy newspaper, Reuters, EFE and Samata India NGO. His work is focused on documentary photography, currently he is working on his project Working far away about seasonal workers in different countries. He intends to continue working on this issue in the months and years to come. Irving Villegas is a feature contributor at INSTITUTE for Artist Management.
Working far away
The need to cross borders for a better life.
With the Working far away project, Villegas wanted to document the circumstances of seasonal workers in different countries. Not only their arduous work but also how they live during the working season. These are workers who go where the work calls them. In this case, they work just a season then go back to their countries to keep on living their everyday lives.
The artist wanted to show the things they must go through to obtain this type of job and understand the necessity this people have to leave their country in order to obtain a better life for them and the family waiting back at home. Some of them go for only one season then return to their country, others travel from city to city or country to country looking for more work. Almost all do this for a better economic stability for their family.
Chapter 1: Asparagus Season, Germany. 2013
Every year approximately 270 000 workers come to Germany to reap the harvest. All foreigners, most of them from Poland and Romania. Without these people, it would be impossible to reap because most unemployed Germans are not willing to do this work. They work every day, 10 hours a day starting at 5 o’clock in the morning. This year, they get 27-57 cents for each kilo of harvest depending on the size of the asparagus. They work whether it is raining or cold or hot.
One of them said: “We come to work, we want to make money and that’s why we do not care about the weather or free days. In the last season I have earned 4,000 euros and that’s why I‘m here again this year. In our country, this money is more valuable than ours.”
This is a look into the lives of a group of harvesters in one of the many farms in Germany that bring foreigners for their annual harvest: it shows us not only how they work in different situations and under the toughest conditions but also their leisure time, their life together and the lifestyle that these people have during their work in Germany.