Earl Dotter - At All Costs: Photographs of American Workers

 

A Talk and Exhibition by Earl Dotter

ArtRage Gallery, Syracuse, NY; May 1, 2017

From the Organizers:

Earl Dotter began his photographic career after completing his studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1968 he joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and was assigned to the Cumberland Plateau Region of Tennessee. Over time, he was welcomed into the homes of coal mining families. He came to know and respect their culture and struggles — a relationship that continues to this day. After his VISTA assignment concluded, he remained in the area to photograph the rank-and-file movement to reform the United Mine Workers Union, then under the corrupt leadership of Tony Boyle.

In 1972 he was invited to join the staff of the reformers’ newspaper, The Miner’s Voice, and subsequently became the photographer for the campaign to unseat Boyle, called “Miners for Democracy.” When the election effort proved successful, Dotter went to work for the UMWA Journal, where he remained until 1977.

Throughout the 1980′s, Dotter photographed a wide array of occupational subjects. His photography has consistently been given life and texture by shooting not just the work, but the whole worker and his or her life on the job, at home, and in the community. Over the years, his subjects have expanded from an emphasis on occupational health and safety to include environmental hazards to public health. The evolution was only logical, since the adverse conditions which first affect people on the job, as they take the “first hit” from exposure to carcinogens, toxins, and industrial waste, eventually make their way out of the worksite and into the air and water of the surrounding environment.

In the Spring of 1996, he began the tour of his exhibit, THE QUIET SICKNESS: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America. After initial exhibits in Washington, DC and at the main branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, the photography exhibit with over 100 works began a tour of the six New England states, sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Occupational Health Program. AIHA Press published the book of the same name as the exhibit in the Spring of 1998.

In 1999 he was appointed without stipend to the Visiting Scholars Program at the HSPH. The exhibit, “APPALACHIAN CHRONICLE, 1969-1999: The Photographs of Earl Dotter,” began its initial showing at The University of Virginia’s Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon in connection with the annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association. Subsequently the exhibit has moved to the Appalshop Gallery in Whitesburg, Kentucky and Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

Earl Dotter is the recipient of the Josephine Patterson Albright Fellowship in Photography for the year 2000 from The Alicia Patterson Foundation. His fellowship project title is: “COMMERCIAL FISHING, Our Most Perilous Trade.” The grant will provide support to document the hazards faced by commercial fishermen far offshore in the North Atlantic as well as in the hand harvesting fisheries along the New England Coast.