The Unseen grew out of years spent among farmworkers in California’s Salinas Valley. These are the people who feed us — and whom we have quietly agreed not to look at too closely.

The arrangement is old and unspoken: we need the labor; they need the work; and so a mutual blindness holds. For many of the workers I came to know, invisibility was not only practical but necessary — a form of protection for themselves and their families.

Until, briefly, we needed them to be visible. During COVID, when the food supply was threatened, we declared them essential — and then, when the crisis passed, looked away again.

These photographs ask what it costs to live unseen. And what it means to finally be looked at.