Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine
Born Lewis Wickes Hine
(1874-09-26)September 26, 1874
Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Died November 3, 1940(1940-11-03) (aged 66)
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Nationality American
Education University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University
Known for Social reform
Movement Documentary; social realism
Patron(s) Russell Sage Foundation
National Child Labor Committee
Works Projects Administration

Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940) was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States.[1]

Early life

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saved his money for a college education. He studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium.[2]

Brooklyn Museum - Climbing into the Promised Land Ellis Island - Lewis Wickes Hine

Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs) and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform.[1]

Documentary photography

In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey.

Child laborers in glassworks. Indiana, 1908
Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning Co. (Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 1911)

In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont,[3] to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice.[4] In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits.

Hine's work for the NCLC was often dangerous. As a photographer, he was frequently threatened with violence or even death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but also posed a serious threat to the industry. To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or even an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery.[5]

During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of "work portraits," which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. In order to obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue.[6]

"Power house mechanic working on steam pump" (1920)

During the Great Depression Hine again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

Later life

In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed.

The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died on November 3, 1940 (at 66) at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.[7]

Legacy

After Hine's death, his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures and did not accept them, but the George Eastman House did.[8]

The Library of Congress holds over 5,000 Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine's photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.[9]

In 2006, author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's historical fiction middle-grade novel, "Counting on Grace" was published by Wendy Lamb Books. The latter chapters center on 12-year-old Grace and her life-changing encounter with photographer Lewis Hine, during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to have many child laborers. On the cover is the iconic photo of Grace's real-life counterpart, Addie Card (1887-1993), taken during Hine's undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill.

In 2016, Time published colorized versions of several of Hine's photographs of child labor in the US.[10]

Notable photographs

Gallery

  1. ^ "Addie Card: Search For An Amemic Little Spinner". Morningsonmaplestreet.com. Retrieved October 15, 2009. 

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Troncale, Anthony T. "About Lewis Wickes Hine". New York Public Library. Archived from the original on March 8, 2007. Retrieved May 22, 2007.
  2. ↑ Smith-Shank, Deborah L. (March 2003). "Lewis Hine and His Photo Stories: Visual Culture and Social Reform". Art Education. 56 (2): 33–37. ISSN 0004-3125. OCLC 96917501.
  3. ↑ "Spinner in Vivian Cotton Mills, Cherryville, N.C.: Been at it 2 years. Where will her good looks be in ten years?". World Digital Library. Retrieved February 11, 2013.
  4. ↑ The American Quarterly, Lewis Hine: From "Social" to "Interpretive" Photographer, Peter Seixas
  5. ↑ Rosenblum, Walter. Foreword. America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904-1940:. Comp. Marvin Israel (1977). New York: Aperture, pp. 9-15. Print.
  6. ↑ Troncale, Anthony T. "Facts about the Empire State Building". New York Public Library. Retrieved May 22, 2007.
  7. ↑ The New York Times; November 4, 1940; "Lewis W. Hine; Photographer Whose Pictures Showed Conditions in Factories", p. 19
  8. ↑ Goldberg, Vicki (September 13, 1998). "The new season / Photography: critic's choice; A Career That Moved From Man to Machine". The New York Times. Retrieved October 25, 2010.
  9. ↑ Lewis Hine Collection
  10. ↑ Dullaway, Sanna (January 29, 2016). "Colorized Photos of Child Laborers Bring Struggles of the Past to Life". Time. Archived from the original on February 6, 2016. Retrieved February 6, 2016.
  11. ↑ "Breaker Boys", Life
  12. ↑ Lewis Wickes Hine Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills, Fayetteville, Tennessee, 1910 at The Jewish Museum
  13. ↑ Brett-MacLean, Pamela (May 27, 2007). "The elderly patient: in situ". CMAJ. Canadian Medical Association. Retrieved April 7, 2009.

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