This collection consists of George Ballis's body of work. George Ballis started his career as a journalist photographer, who focused on photographing migrant workers, their labor, and their living conditions. George Ballis moved to Fresno in 1953 to become the editor of Valley Labor Citizen. While Ballis was doing work for Valley Labor Citizen, Ballis took a series of photographs on the dignity of labor. He started taking pictures of migrant workers, their labor, and their living conditions. Ballis while shooting photographs of labor in Central Valley, he was able to document the nascent union for field workers set up by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), which later would be known as The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). During this period, Ballis captured over 30,000 still images covering Agricultural Labor Unions, farming conditions, and Chicano experiences. The bulk of this collection consists of photographs. Starting in 1969, George Ballis started recording videos and producing films. This collection includes raw film recordings created by Ballis' larger film projects such as "The Dispossessed", "The Oakland Five"; "Toughest Game in Town", and "The Richest Land".

25 Boxes

Copyright is retained by the artist, George Ballis © 2020 TakeStock/ TopFoto. The University of California has permission to make the works available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. All other reproduction or transmission requires permission from the copyright owner(s), heirs, or assigns.

This collection is open for research by request, as it is currently being processed. Once processing is complete the collection will be open for research. The collection is located at the University of California, Merced Library. For help locating material and making a research request please contact library@ucmerced.edu.