neworleanslouisianaphotographydotcom

Debbie Fleming Caffery is a contemporary film photographer from New Iberia perhaps best known for her photographs of sugar cane workers in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. Caffery, who grew up across the bayou from a sugar mill, used to watch with her siblings as barges were loaded down with processed sugar by millworkers and bound for further processing or packaging elsewhere, often wondering about the well-being of the individuals she witnessed involved in the sugar harvest.

She grew up amidst fiery cane fields, the rancid sweet smells of cane syrup in the fall, and the extremely poor communities of African American fieldworkers who struggled to make a living when the mill operations slowed at the conclusion of the yearly harvest. The sugar cane economy left quite an impression on the young photographer, who returned home to begin documenting the annual process upon completing her undergraduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s.

In an interview with ASMP, Caffery spoke about how she developed such close relationships with her subjects over the years:

“Most people were surprised when I gave them an 8 x 10 photograph … they could not believe the pictures were so big. They often invited me to take photos of their families. After spending so much time, particularly in the fields they began to tell me what I missed when I was not there… a particular sunrise, a bear, a fox. Through the images I gave them and the time I spent, they became very aware of how I was seeing and began to share what they would see.”

Caffery published her work from this series in her first book, Carry Me Home, in 1990. She has since published four other monographs and has received numerous awards and grants including the Michael P. Smith Documentary Grant, an Open Society Fellowship grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her newest book, Alphabet, is a children’s book she developed for her grandchildren and was published by Fall Line Press in 2015.

Sources:

http://www.debbieflemingcaffery.com/
https://asmp.org/articles/best-2008-caffery.html#.VqqepPkrLcs
http://www.photoeye.com/debbieflemingcaffery/interview.html
http://www.octaviaartgallery.com/artists/debbie-fleming-caffery
http://www.knowla.org/entry/584/