Invisible Man

• Photographer
  Richard S Street

Jose Martinez, 38, a farmworker in Huron, the poorest town in California, saves money to send home to Mexico by living in a hole that he has excavated beneath the concrete railroad loading docks, While making this image, I kept thinking about the image that Gordon Parks made for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952)of an African-American pushing aside a manhole cover to emerge above ground.

I am an academically-trained historian who photographs the contemporary in an effort to overcome the artificial truncation of knowledge