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MIGRANT TOMATOES

Once a year, Italian families make tomato sauce at home, cooking and canning a huge amount of vegetables.

 

Tons of tomatoes are grown in the fields of the South of the Country and harvested by about 19,000 laborers, paid 1 or 2 euros for each filled box.

 

Only in 2015 there were 13 deaths at work in the fields because of high temperatures. Many of those involved in the harvest are immigrants.

 

On the tomatoes, still dirty with soil, bought by my family to make the sauce, I saw the fingerprints of those who had harvested them, I imagined their stories, the hours spent in the sun, the hope, the desire to work.

 

Since then, I haven’t watched the sauce with the same eyes.

 

With this project I won a Sony World Photography Awards in Still Life category in 2016.

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