Jenn Kane

The name of this person is completely symmetrical, which is completely intentional.

= Activities =

Mod 85 cool mug creeper/taker.

Spiteful blogger/stalker of Eric Peterson.

= Division III =

''This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Eric Peterson, Staff Writer. ''

Unlike most of the photo students vagranting outside Film/Photo, Jenn Kane does not, has not, and will probably never smoke. Tobacco, that is. But she probably knows more about the cancerstick than you. For the past year she has been photographing, observing, and generally hanging out on a tobacco farm in Southwick, Masssachusetts. It’s one of those places you pass along 91 without realizing it, but the Connecticut River Valley is home to one of the most historically-prominent tobacco-growing areas in the US. Also invisible are the people who work here: at this farm, it’s migrant Jamaican workers.

Kane, a pre-med student turned photo concen-trator from New Mexico, came to know the farm through first working with the Brightwood Health Center in Springfield last summer. Brightwood provides free healthcare for mainly undocumented workers who would otherwise go without. While initially interested in doing a traditional medical ethnography of the clinic, Kane instead became interested in how the migrant workers found themselves in this position in the first place: “My Div III situates these tobacco farmworkers in a social and political context. It addresses what social/political reasons caused the farmworkers to come here,” she said. Her artist statement reads: “Standing in the harshly lit tobacco barn, I watch as the farmworkers heave up massive green leaves into the rafters. These fleshy plants physically overtake the men, engulfing their bodies. Later… buyers will consume the cigars; their bodies becoming enveloped in tobacco smoke.”

Using photography, her ethnography illustrates the metaphors that for Kane make sense of the disparate maps of people and goods over time and space, in this case linking the men of Jamaica with the anonymous smoker maybe a few—or a few hundred—miles away. They show tracks in the mud, bodies amongst the plant stalks, and the broader seasonal changes upon which the life of the tobacco, and thus these men coming from thousands of miles to harvest them, are dependent. In both Kane’s written and visual accounts of this place, the seemingly anecdotal moment gives view of a larger horizon of interactions: “ All of these forces play off of each other to form a web of connection, each connection showing a part of the whole.” Jenn Kane’s photographs and writings will be on view May 4 through 6 in the College Library Gallery.