Ernest Lowe Photographs, 1958-2020, bulk 1958-1966

View only results with digital items
Printable guide [HTML]

Summary

Title:
Ernest Lowe Photographs
Dates:
1958-2020, bulk 1958-1966
Extent:
5.22 Linear Feet
Language:
English .

Background

Scope and content:

This collection consists of photographic materials by Ernest Lowe, who documented farmworker communities in the San Joaquin Valley and Salinas Valley between 1960 and 1966 while working for the KPFA-FM radio station. His subjects include field and orchard work, farm worker communities and camps, family life, portraits, agribusiness infrastructure, and early unionization by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and the National Farm Workers Association/United Farm Workers. Lowe returned to the San Joaquin Valley in 2015 to photograph the African-American communities he had documented in the 1960s. The collection includes contact sheets, prints, slides, negatives from 1960-1966 and digital images, videos, and interviews of residents of Teviston and South Dos Palos recorded in 2015.

Arrangement:

This collection is organized into Three Series:

Series 1- Contact Sheets, 1960-1966

Series 2-Negatives, 1958-1966

Series 3-Hard drive, 2013-2020

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Bibliography:

Lowe's work appears in the 1997 PBS documentary The Fight in the Fields, Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Struggle and the 2019 documentary film Adios Amor on the life of farmworker and activist Maria Moreno. Publications featuring his photographs include: Joan London and Henry Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, The Story of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers' Movement (New York: Apollo Editions, 1970); Richard Steven Street, Photographing Farmworkers in California (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004); Richard Steven Street, Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:
Finding aid prepared by Carol Wilson and Emily Lin, 2024. University of California, Merced Library 5200 N. Lake Road Merced, CA 95343
Date Encoded:
This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-08-21 15:29:13 -0700 .

Access and use

Restrictions:

The collection is open for research. Access to the digital materials are restricted until processed. For help locating material and making a research request please contact archives@ucmerced.edu.

Terms of access:

Copyright for the items in this collection is owned by Ernest Lowe (ernestlowe.com). The owner has granted the University of California permission to transmit the works under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0) license. Transmission or reproduction of any materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for obtaining permissions and for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Location of this collection:
5200 North Lake Road
Merced, CA 95343, US
Contact:
(209) 228-4444
archives@ucmerced.edu
Website