Bumper olive harvest in Barga this year

A good year for olives this year which goes some way to making up for the disastrous season of twelve months ago when a sharp frost destroyed most of the crop. Most of the farmers around Barga have reported a good harvest and in fact all of the olive mills and presses in and around the area have been fully booked for weeks as they struggle to deal with the large amount of olives coming in.

O'Connor, the award winning barganews photographer has been following the story of the humble olive from the tree to the table.

He has photographed the olives as they were being picked on the hills around Barga, as they were spread out in the barns whilst waiting to get to the mill and finally when they were turned into virgin olive oil in one of the few remaining cold press mills towards the coast at Camaiore that still use the stone mill wheels.

This concludes a two part project that he has been working on for most of the autumn documenting the position of plastic in traditions around Barga.

The first part which was published last month was about the vendemmia- the wine picking season. Most photographers when confronted with the spectacle of a traditional vendemmia would have avoided images of the plastic containers used to carry the grapes in from the fields. O' Connor made sure in his images that the plastic was not ignored and attempted to make beautiful images with the plastic in centre stage. He maintains that the plastic containers have now become part of the "traditional wine making method" so ignoring them would not be a truthful image.

The second part of this project, this time with the olive harvest, continues this theme.

His images of the olive harvest 2004 can be seen here