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May 18, 2024 — June 15, 2024
Too Hungry to Knock — Don Bartletti
A retrospective exhibition of photojournalist Don Bartletti's 45 years of documentary photography on the U.S./Mexico border. The exhibition features vintage black and white darkroom prints from his earliest film days alongside modern color pigment prints, some made as recently as 2021.
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Don Bartletti is a Southern California–based Pulitzer Prize photojournalist dedicated to creating photo essays, videos, exhibits, and lectures that offer a greater understanding of the causes and consequences of migration into the United States along the southern border.
He was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for the six-part Los Angeles Times series about Central American children riding freight trains through Mexico in a quest to find their mothers in the U.S. The work also won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize, George Polk Award, Overseas Press Club, United Nations Children's Fund Photo Essay of the Year, Scripps-Howard Foundation Award, and many other local and international recognitions.
His 32-year career at the Los Angeles Times was preceded by a combined 10 years with the Vista Press, Oceanside Blade-Tribune, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Assignments took him on every road in San Diego County, the length and width of California, across the U.S.A., along every mile of the border, to nearly every state in Mexico, and 32 countries around the world for news, features, and investigative photo essays.
Now 76 and retired, he keeps an eye on changing migration trends and maintains a friendship with several men and women who have come to the United States over the past four decades in search of a better life.
Don lives with his wife Diana, a ceramic artist, in a North San Diego County, California house that he and his father completed in 1961. He has an adult daughter and son and four grandboys. While not on the front lines of news gathering, he and Diana tend their one-acre home gardens, and occasionally Don makes long-distance motorcycle rides on his vintage 1977 BMW.
If you want to talk photography, gardening, motorcycles, or good beer, he can be contacted on Facebook or at his website: donbartlettiphotography.com
Human migration is the never-ending news story that's been fossilized, painted, sculpted, and storied since the dawn of humanity. Now, it's archived with a camera. Over my little blip of time on Earth, the subject has remained the heart and soul of my photojournalism career.
In the late 1970s when I first gazed at multitudes of people along the San Diego/Tijuana border, it was an exodus of astonishing proportions. With successive frames and interviews came the realization that every person crossing over carried the burden of persistent causes and uncertain consequences. Migration for survival and opportunity was playing itself out in a big way.
I'm not a cultural anthropologist, but I believed early on that our descendants should see this movement of people that brings new neighbors, languages, food, art, entertainment, and cultures into our country, state, cities, towns, schools, fields, factories, and homes.
As a young man with a shoulder bag of manual cameras and film, I never imagined I'd feel like my own descendant, gazing at my decades-old black-and-white images as if they were from another generation.
On the walls of this exhibition, the past and the present meet. The never-ending news story continues. If you're tempted to ask, "How can such things be?", I confess that after 45 years on the U.S./Mexico border, I ask myself the same question.
