ASHTABULA — The Ashtabula Arts Center, in collaboration with Kent State University — Ashtabula, will be presenting the documentary exhibit “Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community.”

The photos by Gary Harwood and text by David Hassler will be on display in the main gallery through Nov. 24. A talk by the artists will be given at the arts center Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. Admission to gallery exhibit and/or the artist's talk is free.

Photographer Gary Harwood first began photographing the migrant workers at the K. W. Zellers and Son Inc., family farm in Hartville, during the summer of 2001 while on assignment for Kent State University. At the time, Kent State nursing and translation faculty and students, along with other organizations, were treating and working with the migrant workers and their families at the Hartville Migrant Community Center.

Harwood was so impressed and inspired by what he saw at the Migrant Center that he knew he wanted to make the migrant community his next project.

Over the next four seasons, Harwood photographed the community of Mexican American and Mexican migrant families, capturing the unique lifestyle of this strong and caring community of families who travel back and forth each year between Ohio and their homes in the southern United States and Mexico.

Of the 130 agricultural migrant camps in Ohio, most provide housing only for single men. Zeller's is different in that they allow entire families to migrate, live and work together in the fields (once they are of age).

At the start of the project, Harwood says that he anticipated that he would be documenting hardship.

“Migrant workers continually face difficult conditions while trying to support themselves and their families,” reads an excerpt from the website, www.growingseason.net. “Farm work is physical, hot, and dirty. The days in the fields are long and exhausting. Growers can be brutal employers, and there is no shortage of documented cases of terrible living and working conditions.

In Hartville, however, Gary found a different story.

"Here the workers and their families live in a strong, tightly knit community supported by the Hartville Migrant Center and many caring neighbors.”

Hartville's community provides a range of in-house health, education and legal services that are not usually available to migrant workers anywhere in the country since there are few government regulations to support or offer aid to migrant workers. But the benefits that the community of Hartville sees from taking better care of their workers are many.

“About 70 percent of the workers return annually to this small northeastern

Ohio town where they have established solid friendships and stable lives."

In 2004, Harwood teamed up with writer David Hassler to create the documentary project.

Harwood has won four national awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, was named the 2001 University Photographers Association of America's Photographer of the Year, and won the 2005 James R. Gordon Ohio Understanding Award from the Ohio News Photographers Association.