From 1911 to 1982 to now...

"When I started to photograph agriculture workers in 1979 and found children as young as 5 working in the fields, I was stunned. I had thought that Hine and his fellow social advocates had effectively eradicated child labor. But now it was my turn to travel across America to document this phenomenon.

I got up early in the morning to see children working in the fields. Entire families were picking together because there were few child-care facilities and the family needed the extra income to eat. Often the children were swaddled in blankets half asleep as their parents began work, then slowly joined in, picking onions or tomatoes or strawberries or blueberries or other crops. These children were exposed to pesticides and savage conditions — heat, lack of water and toilets, constant bending — that are so much a part of agriculture. I met a 7-year-old boy being paid 30 cents a bucket to pick tomatoes in Leipsic, Ohio. As I raised my camera, his eyes met mine. I could see his tiredness and his childhood being stolen by this hard labor.

I remember showing my photographs to editors at numerous publications in the early 1980s. 'Oh, we know that children work in the fields,' some told me. To many, it was not a sexy-enough story."

"Opinion | Ken Light: Photographing child workers"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/08/child-labor-photography-ken-light/

"Today, if we show my photographs from more than 40 years ago alongside Hine’s work from more than 100 years ago, it is not because the phenomenon of child labor in America is a new one. It’s because it continues, often with minimal consequences for the companies that benefit, bolstered by the efforts of a conservative advocacy group that is actively trying to roll back labor protections for kids. As Cesar Chavez wrote in the introduction to my book: 'Exploitation of farm workers and their children is just as real today as it was twenty years ago. The fight is not over — it has just been renewed. You see, time does not heal injustice; only people do.'”

~ Ken Light