By These Hands: Portraits from the Factory Floor - Tapa blanda

David Parker's lens captures what Peter Rachleff calls "a performance, a ritual, an exercise centuries old" - men and women at work on factory floors. These photographs, taken in twenty plants in all parts of Minnesota, explore the common bonds of industrial labor. Whether it's the Ford plant in St. Paul, the Potlatch paper mill in Cloquet, or the Toro engine manufacturer in Windom, Parker seeks to honor the "collective genius of the American worker."
Excerpts from interviews with the workers reveal their opinions on such diverse topics as health care and childcare, union activity, immigrant labor, and the effects of globalization. Their words and these starkly beautiful photographs document industrial workers and the factories in which they work, revealing how workers interact with each other and their environment and how the culture of work is reflected in the jobs women and men do. An appendix provides the history and description of each workplace, detailing the magnitude of production and the constant ingenuity required to manufacture even the most common products.

Peter Rachleff is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Macalester College in St. Paul. He is the author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement and Black Labor in Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890.