Museum security guard DANNY MEAGHER (right) speaks with photographer GREG HALPERN '99 at the opening of his show, which will run until mid-August. Halpern's display consists of photographs of Harvard employees.

After years of capturing Harvard janitors, dining hall workers and security guards on film as they toiled in empty hallways and crowded kitchens, Greg Halpern ’99 decided to share with the community the faces of the men and women he calls the under-appreciated members of Harvard University.

His black-and-white photographs capture Harvard employees as they polish, vacuum or simply pose for his camera.

Twenty-two pictures from the project comprise his first exhibition, “Harvard Works Because We Do,” which opened yesterday in the Carpenter Center and will remain hanging until August 17.

Halpern says he became intrigued by Harvard workers at a meeting held by the Progressive Student Labor Movement during their 1999 Living Wage Campaign, in his senior year.

“I never really thought of myself as a political person, an activist,” he says.

Tuxedos to Soup Kitchens

In the month when he became involved in the campaign, Halpern began conducting interviews with workers that he had met in the Winthrop dining hall and other campus locations.

“I started hearing people’s stories; they made it clear to me that people weren’t getting paid enough,” he says. According to Halpern, workers’ wages were cut the same year that Harvard’s endowment rose by approximately 5 million dollars—and he has a photograph of the tax return.

He says a woman named Carol-Ann, who works as a custodian at the Phoenix S.K. final club, was the person who compelled him to learn about the workers’ lives and their experiences at Harvard.

“I remember seeing guys in their tuxes drinking...someone lifted his legs up and she wiped the table beneath his legs,” he says. “I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.”

Halpern discovered that Carol-Ann, a single mother, ate her dinner each evening in a soup kitchen with her three children. After tape-recording her story, he has gone on to interview approximately 35 workers to date.

“One of the things that frustrated me was that there was such little dialogue between workers and students,” he explains. “I felt like I was getting a second education by talking to workers after I graduated.”

Soon after he began the interviews, Halpern started photographing them in their work environments.

Though he had taken several photography electives as an undergraduate, he says that “it took me probably a year or two to start taking good pictures.”

And even after he became confident with his camera, he says people initially distrusted him: “At first they were like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”