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Matinee: Don Bartletti
10 April 2021
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 391st in our series of Saturday matinees today: Don Bartletti.
This 12:18 production from New Mexico PBS's ¡Colores! television show features Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Don Barletti talking about some of his favorite images from a 40 year career covering Central American immigrants.
That gives him an unusual perspective on the divisive issue. One we couldn't find fault with. He doesn't refer to it as immigration, though.
"Migration for survival," as he refers to the phenomenon, is a basic human need. "It's as old as humanity," he points out, "as unstoppable as the wind and frequently misunderstood."
Photographs record the truth.
The way to break through that misunderstanding is to walk a mile in the shoes of people migrating to survive. His images of people traveling north strip away the mask of statistics, he says. They tell human stories. Ones in which we can recognize ourselves.
His role, he says, is that of a historian. Photographs record the truth. And he has spent his career documenting this age-old and eternal urge to seek a better place to live out one's life.
Barletti worked for the Los Angeles Times for 32 years and newspapers in San Diego county for 10 years prior to that after serving in the Army in Vietname.
"Everybody's got an opinion about migration for surival," he says. "But you know what? All of their opinions are somebody else's. Stuff they heard on the radio or on TV or from a stump speech."
Instead, he shows you the people who, he says, are the real authors of the image. And he shows that image to you, the viewer, who completes the picture. When he shows you these people in a story that never ends, he thinks "maybe you'll say, 'Well, I misunderstood.'"
And you will instead realize it is as unstoppable as the wind.