Mimi Plumb

In 2021, Amanda Maddox wrote about Plumb's work in Aperture saying:

In 2015, she received a California Humanities Grant, alongside writer and historian Miriam Pawel, to develop a history exhibit featuring stories of California farmworkers organizing to cast secret ballots for the union of their choice. In 2017, Plumb received a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship for her project Teen Girls. In 2022, Plumb received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography for a project exploring the impact of climate change in California.

She received her BFA in Photography in 1976 from the San Francisco Art Institute and received her MFA in photography from there in 1986.

In 1974 and 1975, Plumb photographed in the Central and Salinas Valley of California, working with communities of farmworkers. Her photographs document young men living in farm labor camps, the daily work of children and adults side by side in fields, and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) organizers. In the summer of 1975, a new California law allowed farmworkers the right to organize and vote for the union of their choice for the first time ever. Plumb followed UFW organizers who worked with Cesar Chavez to convince farmworkers of the importance of electing union representation through secret ballots. She photographed Chavez's "caminata", a 1,000 mile march from the Mexican border to the Central Valley calling on farmworkers to vote in the upcoming elections in the fields. Plumb's photographs don't focus solely on Chavez, or even the union offices. Rather, they focus on the farmworkers themselves.

Plumb was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Walnut Creek in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, at a time and a place prone to drought, fire, and intense heat. She felt popular and idealized portrayals of suburbia didn't show her experience of growing up in a progressive family during the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At 17, Plumb enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and began photographing the suburb she grew up in and other neighborhoods like it in Marin and Sonoma Counties. Her photographs focus on adolescents, the cycles of heat waves and drought, and ecological destruction. The work subsequently was published in the photo book The White Sky.

Mimi Plumb (born December 1953), also known as Mimi Plumb-Chambers, is an American photographer and educator, living in Berkeley, California. Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged documentary photographers concerned with California. She has published three books, Landfall (2018), The White Sky (2020), and The Golden City (2021).