Debbie Fleming Caffery was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1948. She received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1975. Caffery photographs workers in the local sugarcane fields and sugar mills. She works with a simple camera and prefers to use daylight to illuminate her subjects. The straightforward simplicity of her images aligns her with the documentary tradition of Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans. Caffery's work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, including shows at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. She is also included in many prestigious collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The National Museum of American Art.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.