Art Jankowski: Sacramento Valley Agriculture
Arthur Jankowski was the first child of the first generation in his family to leave farming, and the stories of his relatives’ struggles and successes running small dairy farms in Connecticut form a kind of personal folklore. When he visits, he still takes his mother and aunt on drives to see how the old small farms are holding up—or not. So, when he relocated to Davis and the Central Valley five years ago, the sheer scale of agriculture was striking. The ingenuity, infrastructure, and effort on display here contrast sharply with how the Valley’s natural landscape has been transformed.
For the past five years, Jankowski has used black-and-white photography as a way of understanding this complicated place. These photographs reflect on the region’s agriculture, which both sustains communities and redefines the landscape. Its reach is at once nourishing and disruptive, leaving patterns that are practical, visible, and persistent. His work seeks to hold these tensions—to witness not only what agriculture provides but also the marks it leaves behind.
