Seeing Silicon Valley

Portraits and stories from an unseen community, often forgotten in celebrations of Silicon Valley success
 
By most accounts, the year 2021 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the naming of the Silicon Valley. This is an ideal time to question the promise of this place. Silicon Valley culture expert, Fred Turner, has partnered with photographer, Mary Beth Meehan, to present a new view from the center of the tech world. This photography book does not pay homage to young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses. Instead, we see portraits of those who struggle to survive -families displaced by an impossible real estate market or injured by environmental degradation.
The project began several years ago, when trailers and RVs began to line the streets around the Stanford University campus, where Turner teaches. It was so clear that the myth of friction-free technology promoted in the Valley was rendering the ways people actually lived there impossible to see. Turner and Meehan want to make that world visible, not least because people around the globe point to the Silicon Valley as the source of a benevolent future. This community's stories of stress, poverty, and pollution encourage reflection on the sacrifices of the people living in the same economic zone as thirty-something billionaires and a call for responsibility to the real Silicon Valley.