“Chris has been a real inspiration to me,” he says.

“I think there’s something he appreciated about this project.”

He says Killip was his main advisor for the project as he was shooting it.

“I was out of school and working stupid jobs.,” he says..”I was learning about work on campus that way. But I was also starved for any kind of artistic feedback.”

Halpern says that his “major motivating factor” in undertaking the project was being “disappointed” with Harvard during his involvement with the Living Wage Campaign, and knowing that he could show other people the stories that he had heard from workers.

Although he says his politics are “pretty evident,” Halpern would rather not “hit people over the head with a political message.”

“I felt the most effective thing I could do was just to let as many other people out there meet these workers and make up their own minds,” he says. “That’s why I like people looking into the camera directly, so that other people can look them in the eyes as if they were meeting them.”

Although Halpern is uncertain what the future brings for him, he says he is currently shooting a project consisting of color photos of landscapes.

“It’s like you can’t control the things you get interested in,” he says. “I think of the work I did with the Living Wage Campaign as the most direct political thing I could do to effect change, and some great things came out of the campaign, but I was ultimately disappointed. I felt like the lasting contribution I wanted to make was one that would affect people’s consciousness.”

—Staff writer Ryan J. Kuo can be reached at kuo@fas.harvard.edu.