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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximumfund.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne. If you have the time, I want you to try something. Go to your

favorite search engine and type the phrase, migrant farm workers, and then click on images. Look at the

photos. There are thousands of them. You will see some patterns. Almost all the photographs are set

in a lush green field mid-harvest,

and almost every photo has multiple people in the shot, sometimes dozens. And the people in the

photos are almost always doing the same thing. They're hunched over, picking strawberries or

radishes or lettuce. Can you make out

their faces? Maybe a few. But basically, these are landscape shots. And if you click over to the

webpage where that photo appears, does it say anything about who the people in the picture are,

why they work where they work, even just their names? Probably not.

My guess, Noi Montes noticed that too. Noa's parents worked on farms when he was growing up,

and he remembers moving around the Southwest as the seasons changed. He lived and worked

with the people in those photographs. And when he, as middle-aged adult became a full-time fine art photographer,

he made it a point to show those people as people, not objects in a landscape.

Noi Montez's work extends beyond portraits of farm workers, of course. He has made

incredible pictures in the studio. He has made beautiful landscapes, some incredible street photography.

If you live in Southern California, you can see some of that work now at the Riverside Art

Museum. Noi Montez's regional history runs there through April 19th.

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