UTD presents “Immigrant Entrepreneurs: At Work and at Home in Dallas”

Start date: Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Event is ongoing: Until Tuesday, May 1, 2007

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is one of the most important new cities of immigration in the United States. For the past three decades, significant immigrant populations from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America have settled in Dallas. Although the issue of cross-border immigration from Mexico dominates the media and immigration policy at all levels of government, it is only a part of a larger story of global migration. Dallas-Fort Worth is being transformed by this global migration in ways that are directly comparable to the changes that occurred in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of the earlier waves of European migration.

Paul Greenberg, a distinguished Dallas photographer with a career spanning more than thirty years, has turned his attention to the visual impact of immigration on his own city. He has chosen as his subject immigrants who own their own businesses in the Dallas area. He has identified men and women from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and created a series of paired posed photographs of them both in their workplace and at home. For the past twenty years, Greenberg has restricted his work to black-and-white panoramic photography, and he has again applied this format to the paired photographs. For that reason, we as viewers learn as much about the visual worlds in which these immigrant entrepreneurs live and work as we do about the men and women.

Paul Greenberg works in a long tradition of urban documentary photography, and his decision to focus his attention on new immigrants builds on a body of documentary photographic work dating to the late 19th century that has represented the immigrant experience. Yet, unlike the photographic exposés of artists like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine early in the 20th century, Greenberg has selected highly successful and motivated immigrants; those who, within a single generation, have come to live “the American dream” through hard work, persistence, and imagination. His men and women vary in national origin from the Sudan to France and in profession from a baker to a retailer of luxury furniture and decorative objects. Their homes vary from ethnically specific to generically “American.”

The exhibition at UT Dallas will be held in the galleries of the Cecil Green Center for Science and Society at the center of the campus. It is curated by Richard R. Brettell, Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Professor of Art and Aesthetic Studies. The exhibition will feature 19 pairs of panoramic photographs and will be documented by a catalogue with essays on immigration to the DFW Metroplex and immigrant entrepreneurship by Dr. Caroline Brettell, Dedman Family Professor of Anthropology and Dean ad Interim of Dedman College at SMU, and another on Greenberg’s photographs in the context of American urban documentary photography of the 29th and 20th centuries by Dr. Richard Brettell. Paul Greenberg will also provide an artist’s statement.

Information from the University's site