Trimmers (or trimmigrants, as they called locally) are the illegal seasonal workers who come to Northern California every year to work in the marijuana industry. They are a small gear of a complex black market mechanism whose job is clipping and cleaning the marijuana buds before they get to the buyers.
The nature of work has created a unique social phenomenon, a flux of migration: clandestine, countercultural and hedonistic in its' moods.
Living in vans and tents; passing free days in cheap motels; working in remote mountain camps while earning thousands of dollars by trimming and smoking highest quality weed – that's the realities of the illicit migrants.
Working on these photo series I wanted to step aside from all the pros and cons of legalization and paint a frank picture of the last four years of the postmodern Wild West before the new regulations would end it.
Northern California