The Scrapbook

While I was caught off guard by this practice, I proceeded to request same thing, taking the entire scrapbook to digitize the remaining materials. Over the course of the next week, I digitized around 200 photographs at 1800x1800 pixels so we could zoom into the small scale prints. Retaining these archival copies, I also created derivative versions where I adjusted light levels to increase visual legibility.

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Black and white photo of a younger and older woman sitting together in a dark room in front of a large sheet cake that reads Happy Birthday to Agnes and Jacob. — Two laborers sit in front of a sheet cake gifted by the cannery workers union, demonstrating some of the difficult lighting and exposure encountered in the digitizing of this material, ca. 1938. Photograph by Salvador Caballero, courtesy of FANHS.

What I found was totally unique; an intimate, first person portrait of cannery life, traveling between Seattle, San Francisco and Alaska. Alaskeros were documented lounging on the coastline, blowing out candles on a birthday cake provided by their labor union and engaging with the indigenous community, who I would later learn are the Aluutiq of Kodiak Island. Caballero only turns the camera on himself a handful of times, posing closely with a visiting woman who may have been his partner. The album also represents a unique moment in time for cannery workers, whose union was finally organized with an explicit vision of “race unity,” before the union would again dwindle in numbers and strength with WWII fast approaching.

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Black and white photo of a group of laborers sitting together agains a wood panel wall on wooden docks wearing hats and denim work clothes. — Laborers sitting outside Larsen Bay Cannery facilities, Kodiak Island, Alaska, ca. 1938. Photograph by Salvador Caballero, courtesy of FANHS.

I was surprised to find things appeared much more diverse than descriptions of cannery life in the research I was reading; White, Japanese, Filipino and Indigenous people hunched together on the docks, female workers sat together on simple wooden pathways and some people even brought their children along with them for the canning season. This was all in contrast to the majority of early cannery visual documentation produced by the United States Fish Commission, where the focus was always inside the cannery, primarily on machinery, with the occasional laborer dwarfed in the background. Only a handful of items were labeled above the photographs with place names (Larsen Bay, San Francisco, Karluk and Seattle) but I did have the photographer’s name on the cover: Salvador Caballero.

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