The Wages of Work
Photojournalist Earl Dotter documents the
damage done.
By Lloyd Ferriss
Staff Writer
In one image, a woman stares pensively at her
bandaged hands. She's disabled from repetitive
stress injury after working just one year in a
North Carolina poultry processing plant.
Another picture shows a young man seated out
of doors. Two children lean against his
shoulders. He's bandaged, too, the result of an
underground coal mine explosion in Virginia.
 A
smaller photograph shows a worried guard leaning
against a brick wall at the Maine State Prison
in Thomaston. Below her, a line of male inmates
parade in a courtyard.
The three black-and-white images, captured by
Maryland photojournalist Earl Dotter, document
in chilling detail the injuries and dangers
millions of American workers face every day. The
three photographs now hang at the Danforth
Gallery in Portland with 117 other towering
works by Dotter. The show, "The Quiet
Sickness," is at the Danforth through May
23.
The show is traveling the country and has
already hung in several cities, including
Washington. In Portland, Dotter's exhibit is
sponsored by the Maine Institute for
Occupational Health Education. Despite backing
by government and private groups endeavoring to
show that workplace conditions need improvement,
"The Quiet Sickness" soars beyond
documentation. Dotter's project of photographing
workers spans 25 years and is the primary work
of a master photographer.
His pictures reveal the soul of workers as
much as they reveal assaults to their bodies.
"Earl's pictures make you feel for the
people involved," said Naomi Rosenblum of
New York City, author of "The World History
of Photography."
A photograph by Dotter in Rosenblum's book,
and in the Portland exhibit, shows a young widow
carrying a folded American flag at her husband's
funeral. The man commemorated at the funeral
survived Vietnam, only to die in a 1976 coal
mine explosion in Kentucky.
"These are moving pictures," said
Rosenblum. "They don't make fun of people.
They get to the heart of what an individual
feels like when he's spent his life working and
is overcome by disease through no fault of his
own."
Dotter, 54, said it's dignity in people he's
actually trying to photograph.
"If there's anything I hope my pictures
project," he says, "it's the
individuality and uniqueness of each person in
the pictures. I hope that individuality allows
the viewer ... not to pass these people
by."
For his show at the Danforth, Dotter selected
a number of images that show hazardous
conditions typical of the Maine workplace.
Though just one picture was actually taken in
the state (the prison guard at Thomaston), many
illustrate dangerous labor practices on American
farms, at sea and in the forest.
That's important, said Peter Doran, an
officer with the Maine Institute for
Occupational Health Education. "In
Maine," he said, "we have more than
our share of hazardous types of work."
The man who dedicated 25 years of his life to
photographing threatened and injured workers
grew up in Pennsylvania. His father was a watch
maker, his mother a bakery worker.
Dotter didn't pick up a camera until he was
out of college. But when he discovered
photography in a course at the School for Visual
Arts in New York City, it changed his life.
"I lived on the lower East Side in a cheap,
walk-up apartment," he said, "and I
started photographing people."
Within two years, he was doing cover photos
for New York magazine and Saturday Evening Post.
What further changed his life was a stint in
the federal Vista program that brought him to
the coal mining regions of Tennessee. Dotter
photographed the miners, who were then engaged
in bitter union-management feuds. After Vista,
he worked for five years as a graphic designer
and photographer for a magazine published by a
coal miners union.
"I was made welcome by the miners,"
he said. "We'd have supper together before
shooting the next morning in the mine. I had an
opportunity to listen to the things they thought
were important."
As he went about his work photographing
people in dangerous situations--and often
putting himself in danger--Dotter fought a
shyness that had haunted him since childhood.
"The camera became the vehicle I used to
overcome my own personal shyness," he said.
"It gave me an excuse to poke my nose into
other people's business."
In some ways, said Dotter, his once painful
shyness actually helps him photograph people.
"I don't fill a room," he said.
"I let my subject fill the room, giving him
the opportunity to emote more than me."
Among the unforgettable images is a photograph
of a miner whose face is blackened, his
determined eyes staring from beneath his head
lamp. Then there's the recent picture of laundry
workers in the Bronx. They wear wire gloves to
protect themselves from hypodermic needles that
show up in the wash.
By illustrating problems in the workplace,
Dotter follows a tradition established by great
documentarians of the past--Lewis Hines, who
exposed child labor practices in the early
1900s, and Eugene Smith in the years that
followed World War II.
"It's especially important that some
people keep that tradition alive," says
Rosenblum. "The tradition always has as its
main goal not just informing people but moving
them. Earl's pictures do that. They make you
feel for the people involved."
- Reprinted from the Maine
Sunday Telegram, May 3, 1998
© Maine Telegram
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