A portrait of seven Black men standing in a field during the daytime in Ontario, Canada. These men are migrant farmers who come to Canada to work each year. Each man is holding a melon, the fruit they harvested from the field where they stand. The top third of the image is an almost clear blue sky, behind them is a luscious green field and the bottom third is the dirt track where they stand at the field’s edge. Each man is wearing a pair of Wellington boots, gloves, and different hats to protect them from the sun. Their clothing differs for each man but consists of jeans mixed with various modern t-shirts, hooded tops and sweaters. Each man stands upright and looks directly into the camera.
This image was taken on assignment for The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine in August 2025. It was part of a larger photo essay documenting migrant farm workers and the farms that employ them in Ontario, Canada. The resulting article, titled Top of the Food Chain, ran as the cover story for the September 2025 issue of Report on Business and was also nominated in the “Photo Essay & Photojournalism” category at the 2026 National Magazine Awards.
The intent of the image was to capture the people who put the food on the table of Canadians. After spending time with these men whilst they picked melons, I organized them for a portrait holding the fruit they had harvested. The portrait was intended to sit alongside other historical images of farm workers, particularly Black farm workers, as a document of what they looked like, the food they picked, and the clothes they wore in 2025.
Many of the workers I met on this assignment were from Jamaica and Mexico. As a person of colour, with family ties to Jamaica, I wanted to capture an image that could work as a historical marker of where these men were in 2025. There was no intention to convey anything positive or negative about their situation; rather, I wanted to show Canadians the faces of people who are a vital part of their everyday lives.
The image was captured on a Mamiya RB67 medium-format film camera using Kodak Portra 400 film.
Explore the other stories–Gabriel Hutchinson is a photographer from London, UK, now based in Toronto. Working mostly in photojournalism, portraiture, and commercial assignments with a focus on people, place, and narrative, his work spans both fast-paced editorial environments and more considered storytelling. Combining observational reportage with portraiture, he places emphasis on building trust and working closely with subjects to create thoughtful, human-led images.
