About the Photos

With the encouragement of his faculty advisor at San Jose State University, after receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic Design, Earl Dotter enrolled in the Advertising and Photography program of the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1967. It was here that his interest in photography received its first recognition. While still a student at the school, his photographs were published on two covers of New York Magazine. And his pictures of the urban crisis taken after Martin Luther King’s assassination, appeared in the final revival of The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1968 Earl Dotter joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and was assigned to the Tennessee coalfields. It was here that he first photographed coal miners and their serious health and safety concerns. After VISTA, he continued to work in the Appalachian Region photographing for the United Mine Workers Journal. Since that time Dotter has sought to document the lives of workers throughout the United States. In so doing, his goal has been to personalize the whole worker and his or her life on the job, at home and in the community.

By 1996 Earl Dotter had assembled his occupational photographs to create the exhibit, THE QUIET SICKNESS: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America. In 1998, the book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibit on a tour of the six New England states, sponsored by The Harvard School of Public Health. In 1999 he was invited to become a Visiting Scholar with the Occupational Health Program through the Harvard NIOSH Education and Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In 2000 Dotter received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship to document what is now this nation’s most dangerous occupation: commercial fishing. After the World Trade Center attack, he photographed the heavily impacted NYC firehouses and at Ground Zero. THE PRICE OF FISH and WHEN DUTY CALLS are the exhibits that resulted from these photography projects. Dotter received the American Public Health Association’s, Alice Hamilton Award in 2001.

In 2002 Earl Dotter ended over 30 years as a film based 35mm photojournalist. His current assignment and personal projects are now exclusively in professional digital format. The tradition of processing and printing images as an integral part of the creative process informs his digital image making today.

Recent exhibits include:

• Our Future in Retrospect? COAL MINER HEALTH IN APPALACHIA
• The Photographs of Russell Lee 1946 and Earl Dotter 2006
• JUST A NURSE, A 2007 Nurses Week Tribute to Nursing Practice With Appreciation to the Nurses at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania

Photographs by Earl Dotter, Writing & Interviews by Suzanne Gordon