Pulse
Worked Up
David L. Parker, M.D., uses his photography skills to document the injustice of child labor.
Boys and girls pick through the vast, putrid dumps of Indonesia, scavenging for wood, plastic, glass, metal, and food to sell; youngsters with deformed hands weave carpets in factories in Nepal; and street children in Central America hawk newspapers, vegetables, souvenirs, even their own bodies in order to survive. These are some of the stories told in the photographs of David L. Parker, M.D. And in an image-saturated culture, they’re partly what make the photographs stand out.
Parker, an occupational health physician and epidemiologist at Park Nicollet Clinic in Minneapolis and adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota, has found photography to be not just a pastime but also a powerful medium for driving home the message of what life is like for children who work in low-paying, often dangerous jobs in order to survive.
It’s a passion that began 17 years ago when he was studying the effects of work on the health of adolescents in Minnesota. “It was purely academic to answer an esoteric question about the nature of data on work-related injuries,” says Parker, who with large-framed glasses looks perpetually curious. But as he began to see how children were treated both in this country and others, his academic work soon became a mission that he says is “to inspire hope and make life better, if only for a few.”
Driven to tell a story that epidemiology alone can’t, Parker has since photographed some of the 250 million children working in the United States, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Thailand, Nepal, Morocco, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India, financing his trips with grant money and his own funds. “Epidemiology can sanitize work,” Parker said during a lecture and slide show at the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) injury symposium in October 2003. “Writing about parts per million hides the choking dust.”
Hobby Turned Passion
Parker’s images aren’t just noteworthy for the gripping stories they tell but also for their artfulness. His photos are in “the spirit of the best photo reportage,” says Ted Hartwell, curator of photographs at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which includes hundreds of Parker’s works in its permanent collection.
Yet Parker didn’t set out to become an artist. He picked up photography on a whim some 20 years ago. At the time, he was practicing medicine and looking for a hobby. “It was photography or ceramics,” he recalls. “You can’t do photography and ceramics in the same house.”
Although Parker sometimes downplays his artistic and humanitarian ambitions, fellow photographer and friend Tom Arndt says everything Parker does is born of the same spirit. “[Photography] is an extension of him,” says Arndt, who lives in Chicago and was Parker’s first photography teacher. “It’s a way to incorporate issues that he felt were important as a physician. It’s a calling. A mission. He looks at his life and his photography as a way of clarifying what he’s after. He’s committed to this issue of having kids be safe.”
The World of Work
Parker has always held a deep respect for workers of any age, and the health risks and discomforts to which they are exposed on the job. Many of his patients “run the city,” he says. They are bus drivers, welders, roofers, garbage collectors, nurses, paramedics, and factory workers. He also finds workplaces that are very different from his own sterile offices at Park Nicollet inherently interesting from an artistic perspective. “I love the light and texture or the smell of solvents and grease or learning how some object is made,” he said during the NORA symposium.
In the world of child labor, workplaces are less fascinating than they are just plain filthy and dangerous. For example, in Indonesia, thousands of children work on fishing platforms out at sea, where the hours are long and dangerous waves can sweep them away at any moment. The children are paid between $1 and $2.50 a week to hoist large nets onto the platform.
Parker wants his photographs to inspire hope, and, at the same time, change lives. Six years ago, with the backing of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, Parker, his wife, and others, founded a school in Nepal’s Sankhu village that provides free education and a daily meal to 180 students. Nepalese students have lived with the Parkers while attending the University of Minnesota. With no children of their own, the Parkers have a huge international family, with countless children touching their lives if only briefly through the lens of the physician’s camera.
The Human Connection
Parker’s respect for the dignity of the individual, even in the most inhumane conditions, is apparent in his photographs. Parker says he makes every effort to understand something about the environment and to see the humanity in the individual before him even if the interaction with his subject only lasts a minute. “It’s where he stands, the way he uses available light to find a highlight. There will be an eye or a hand, some focal point,” Arndt says.
For Parker, whose third book on child labor, Before Their Time: Child Labor in the Global Community, is due out this fall, it is about connecting with people where they are without sentimentality. “The way I interact is identical in medicine and photography,” he says. “I try to be open and honest with folks. Respectful, clear and open, free of exploitation.”
Those intentions are aided by the 55-year-old’s youthful appearance and demeanor. As wiry as a teenager, with a full head of curly brown hair, he appears scattered and youthful. “He has a remarkable manner,” says the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ Hartwell. “He’s non-threatening, gentle. No matter what language or culture, kids respond to him.”
Parker is well-aware that artistic integrity is essential to delivering a powerful, honest message. “Creating a decent image,” he says, is the best defense against his work becoming maudlin or cliché. Indeed, Parker knows that the message of injustice would be lost if the photographs were not artistically sound. “If the image isn’t good, it doesn’t matter,” he says.—Susan Gaines