Orange Girls: 2022

These works were part of my 2022 September solo show.

These scaled-up photos of young white women posing in orange groves are adapted from pre-WWII pamphlets advertising citrus-centric towns in Florida and California hoping to grow their populations. The original imagery appears in context with other “offerings” of these typically newly incorporated towns— factories, suburban housing, and fresh infrastructure— with the male gaze almost comically front of mind. Very little is known about the individual women who posed for these photos— were they models or were they workers in the orange industry at all? If so, it’s unlikely they were fruit pickers as the photos imply, that exhausting labor was reserved for male workers, many of whom were BIPOC. If the women seen here worked for the factories, they were most likely packers, working on an assembly-line inside a packinghouse, repeatedly washing, grading (sorting the fruit by size), delicately wrapping citrus in tissue paper and placing it in wooden crates. Like their male counterparts in the groves, packers were paid “piece rate wages,” meaning a good worker was fast but a well-paid worker was faster.