Our Daily Bread
A lyrical examination of the men and women around the world involved in creating the daily food staple of bread
“Magnum photographer Erich Hartmann’s long-term project shows the human work involved in making a food staple – bread – that exists in many forms across nearly all cultures, depicting the processes involved ranging from land-clearing through to planting and harvesting, to the feeding of millions.
From the early 1950s he added material to this project – land workers in Israel, combine harvesting in Nebraska, a miller in rural France, a soup kitchen, a Paris bakery, a Bedouin in Beersheba selling grain at the market, a school cafeteria. Our Daily Bread was first shown in a large exhibition in New York 1962 and is now published as a book.
The product of eight years of thought and work, Erich Hartmann’s Our Daily Bread is his lyrical tribute to the men and women everywhere whose daily work helps to create the bread which feeds us all and which has become a metaphor for sustenance. His photographs make a picture-poem of the significance of bread to us all.” – Ruth Bains Hartmann.
This story was also published in the book Magnum Stories, published by Phaidon. A very limited number of copies of Magnum Stories are available from the Magnum Shop, signed by Magnum photographers.
