Lewis Hine
West Point, 1911
Vintage gelatin silver print on paper, 12 x 16.8 cm
Lewis Hine (Oshkosh, WI, United States, 1874 – Hastings-on-Hudson, United States, 1940) studied sociology at the University of Chicago and graduated in education at New York University (1905), together with outstanding researchers and progressive teachers such as John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young. He also met Arthur Kellogg – editor of the weekly journal Charities and the Commons – and one of his first employments as a teacher was at the Ethical Culture School in New York; from there he took part in the debates about progressive social and educational reforms. In that context and activity, in about 1903 he took his first steps in photography for educational purposes and began to build up a collection of pictures that he used in his classes. In less than ten years Hine became a central figure in the use of photography to construct a humanist ideology based on progress, education, well-being and the relationship with work, and also on human rights. Two outstanding series in his work are the one about immigrants at Ellis Island (1903, 1926) and the one about child labour, a commission that lasted for many years and that he carried out for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), basically between 1908 and 1918, covering the entire territory of the United States.
In 1908 Hine decided to give up teaching and devote himself exclusively to photography. That year he carried out his first mission for the NCLC and he presented himself in an advertisement in the press as Lewis W. Hine Social Photography, “an experienced photographer who is in touch with social work […] to offer graphic representation of conditions and methods of work, through pictures for exhibits, reports, folders, magazines and newspaper articles, and lantern slides”. He then set up an agency, Hine Photo Service. His photographs appeared in publications such as Charities and the Commons, Survey, Outlook and Everybody’s, among others, as well as illustrating surveys and projects such as the Pittsburgh Survey (1907–1908) and Charles Weller’s book Neglected Neighbors in the National Capital (1908).
West Point is one of the photos that he took for the NCLC, one of a series of pictures taken in the cotton factories in that town in the state of Mississippi. The aim of the pictures was to denounce child labour and the poverty and living conditions to which children were subjected: the loss of their childhood, illiteracy, destruction of personality and so on. In this photograph, as in all his work, Hine succeeds in combining social and aesthetic dimensions. On the one hand, it exemplifies his use of the camera as an instrument and agent of social change and his understanding of photography as a means of non-verbal communication. In this regard, Hine became a pioneer of the documentary photography that was developed by the next generation. On the other hand, it shows the construction of a new iconography, that of the child proletariat. In this case, the picture of the girl – identified by some sources as Eva Streety – was taken on a porch. The figure of the child stands out against the background of a wood-built house, eliminating any detail that might divert attention from the face and not allowing any possibility of considering it as anecdotal.
Hine uses a direct style to create a picture in which there is a kind of compassion, but it is not a pretty picture, because this photograph, like all the other pictures of child labour (workers in textile factories, paper sellers, cotton pickers, miners, etc.), was potentially intended to support public campaigns of reformist movements in favour of legislation against the exploitation of children. In 1916 the United State Congress proposed the first law to restrict child labour, but it was not approved; it was not until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act limited child labour. Moreover, although Hine was working with particular iconographic themes, the girl portrayed here is not a type but a real person, someone with a history who lives in a particular town and works in a particular factory. By individualising the child who is portrayed, the picture becomes more powerful as a document of denunciation.
With regard to the part that his photos played in public campaigns – and his service as a social photographer – Hine indicated the importance of photographic quotations and the power that a combination of text and image could have in the task of making people aware of the need for legal reform, through the media, leaflets, demonstrations or meetings and conferences.
In Hine’s career there was a second phase, in the 1930s. As a witness of the transformation of New York City, Hine photographed the construction of the Empire State Building, and in 1932 he published a photographic report, Men at Work, a tribute to the new men in the machine age (cranes, metal casting, railways, aviation, building, etc.). In 1936 he took part in a state project for the Workers Project Administration (WPA). In that year Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman founded the Photo League in New York, and they acknowledged him as a forerunner in the field of documentary photography because he cleared the way for understanding the practice of photography as a political act capable of bringing about transformation.
References
Robert Macieski: Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2015.
Lewis Hine en la Colección de la George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. Fundación Mapfre / TF Editores, Madrid, 2011.
John Raeburn: A Staggering Revolution. A Cultural History of Thirties Photography. University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2006