Show Turns Lens on Harvard Staff

After years of capturing Harvard janitors, dining hall workers and security guards on film as they toiled in empty hallways and crowded kitchens, Greg Halpern ’99 decided to share with the community the faces of the men and women he calls the under-appreciated members of Harvard University.

His black-and-white photographs capture Harvard employees as they polish, vacuum or simply pose for his camera.

Twenty-two pictures from the project comprise his first exhibition, “Harvard Works Because We Do,” which opened yesterday in the Carpenter Center and will remain hanging until August 17.

Halpern says he became intrigued by Harvard workers at a meeting held by the Progressive Student Labor Movement during their 1999 Living Wage Campaign, in his senior year.

“I never really thought of myself as a political person, an activist,” he says.

Tuxedos to Soup Kitchens

In the month when he became involved in the campaign, Halpern began conducting interviews with workers that he had met in the Winthrop dining hall and other campus locations.

“I started hearing people’s stories; they made it clear to me that people weren’t getting paid enough,” he says. According to Halpern, workers’ wages were cut the same year that Harvard’s endowment rose by approximately 5 million dollars—and he has a photograph of the tax return.

He says a woman named Carol-Ann, who works as a custodian at the Phoenix S.K. final club, was the person who compelled him to learn about the workers’ lives and their experiences at Harvard.

“I remember seeing guys in their tuxes drinking...someone lifted his legs up and she wiped the table beneath his legs,” he says. “I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.”

Halpern discovered that Carol-Ann, a single mother, ate her dinner each evening in a soup kitchen with her three children. After tape-recording her story, he has gone on to interview approximately 35 workers to date.

“One of the things that frustrated me was that there was such little dialogue between workers and students,” he explains. “I felt like I was getting a second education by talking to workers after I graduated.”

Soon after he began the interviews, Halpern started photographing them in their work environments.

Though he had taken several photography electives as an undergraduate, he says that “it took me probably a year or two to start taking good pictures.”

And even after he became confident with his camera, he says people initially distrusted him: “At first they were like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”

Halpern spent hours photographing his subjects—almost all custodians or food service workers—“until they really got sick of me,” he jokes.

“I guess I liked the uniformity of that,” he says, explaining why he chose to limit his subject matter. “And statistically, those are the two lowest paid positions on campus, with a few exceptions.”

The project took him four years to complete, beginning in the spring of 1999 and ending only a few months ago. Halpern says he has photographed “hundreds” of different Harvard workers.

He has also photographed objects and He has also photographed objects and scenes that signify the workplace. “Visually, I felt it was important to keep people guessing, or awake,” he says.

One photograph depicts a bag of soda cans hanging next to a custodian’s trash can, which she had planned to use for her own profit. Another shows an empty basement of the Harvard Business School that is lit very brightly in order to keep workers awake, according to Halpern.

Halpern plans to compile 65 of his photographs in a book, also titled Harvard Works Because We Do, to be published in October. The book will include edited transcripts of his interviews with 15 workers, which he refers to as “narratives.”

“I liked the idea of these people, who didn’t get to be in the spotlight that much, [on] their podium talking,” he says of why he chose to include only the words of the workers and none of his own.

The Only Thing To Do

Though he was interested in photography at an early age, Halpern says he only thought of it as a hobby at first.

“I think my parents wanted me to think of it as a hobby,” he laughs. “When I graduated, I was really stumped as to what to do with myself, and I was lucky enough to get a small grant to Buffalo and take pictures.

“Ultimately, I came back here and decided this was the only thing I really, really wanted to do.”

He says he was intrigued by the photographs of Milton Rogovin, who shot the lower west side of Buffalo, a working-class neighborhood.

And a text-based book, Studs Terkel’s Working, was a major conceptual influence.

“It was people talking about their jobs, the psychological effects of work and what work does to them,” he says. “It really made me curious about people working at Harvard.”

Halpern cites Walker Evans and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies Chris Killip, under whom he served as a teaching fellow, as additional photographic inspirations.

“Chris has been a real inspiration to me,” he says.

“I think there’s something he appreciated about this project.”

He says Killip was his main advisor for the project as he was shooting it.

“I was out of school and working stupid jobs.,” he says..”I was learning about work on campus that way. But I was also starved for any kind of artistic feedback.”

Halpern says that his “major motivating factor” in undertaking the project was being “disappointed” with Harvard during his involvement with the Living Wage Campaign, and knowing that he could show other people the stories that he had heard from workers.

Although he says his politics are “pretty evident,” Halpern would rather not “hit people over the head with a political message.”

“I felt the most effective thing I could do was just to let as many other people out there meet these workers and make up their own minds,” he says. “That’s why I like people looking into the camera directly, so that other people can look them in the eyes as if they were meeting them.”

Although Halpern is uncertain what the future brings for him, he says he is currently shooting a project consisting of color photos of landscapes.

“It’s like you can’t control the things you get interested in,” he says. “I think of the work I did with the Living Wage Campaign as the most direct political thing I could do to effect change, and some great things came out of the campaign, but I was ultimately disappointed. I felt like the lasting contribution I wanted to make was one that would affect people’s consciousness.”

—Staff writer Ryan J. Kuo can be reached at kuo@fas.harvard.edu.