In 1977, Roger Minick was one of five photographers selected to work on a two-year National Endowment for the Arts Photo Survey project on the Mexican American community, a project co-sponsored by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The project, Espejo, generated two new series of photographs by Minick: one on Mexican American residents in East Los Angeles and a second on undocumented workers living and working on farmland near San Diego.

Minick was setting up his Hasselblad to photograph the mural when the man in this photograph walked by. Minick asked him to pose and captured this remarkable image of a man who could have been the winning general.

This image is mounted with rag tape to a 16 x 24 inch rag board that Minick signed. The image has not been removed from the overmat. It may also be signed on the mat underneath the image, lower right,, which is where Minick typically signed. It is also stamped and signed on the verso.

Roger Minick was born in Ramona, Oklahoma in 1944 and grew up in Arkansas. He began working in photography when he attended the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 to 1969. He started his first photographic project, Delta West, in 1966, in which he documented the land and people of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The project evolved into an award-winning book entitled Delta West (Scrimshaw Press, 1969), and was heralded as one of the Fifty Best Books of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1970. In addition to receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Minick was one of five photographers selected to work on a two-year project on the Mexican American community called Espejo, which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1977.