Ingar Krauss - Workers

Workers is a project concerned with "the difficult state of identity today in Eastern Europe, hard physical work and the problem of working migration in general". More than 300,000 labourers from Poland, Ukraine or Romania migrate to Germany every year. Their season starts with the asparagus harvest in April and ends with the gathering of cabbage and grapes in autumn.

Krauss adds: "The seasonal workers are mostly men, young and old. They come from different social levels and backgrounds. They live for weeks and months together in temporary shacks with double-decker beds. They work seven days a week and usually have no contact with the local Germans. Most of them don’t speak one word of German. The German farmers need them urgently; the whole harvest depends on these men from abroad because there are not enough Germans who are willing to do such underpaid and hard physical work. So thousands of harvest hands come and go every year like birds of passage".

"In summer 2006 and 2007 I took portraits of these workers who came to us a long way. I met them in the asparagus and strawberry fields, or in the evening sitting in front of their shacks".

You can see the complete series and an interview with the photographer in Lens Culture

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All pictures ©Reinaldo Loureiro et alii