Lewis
Wickes Hine
was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on 26th September, 1874. He
studied sociology in Chicago and New York (1900-07) before finding
work at the Ethical Culture School. Hine, who had purchased his first
camera in 1903, employed his photographs in his teaching and established
what became known as documentary photography.
Hine also used his camera to capture the poverty he witnessed in New
York. This included a photographic study of Ellis Island immigrants.
In 1908 Hine published Charities and the
Commons, a collection of photographs of tenements and sweatshops.
Hine hoped he could use these photographs to help bring about social
reform. He told one meeting that he believed his photographs would
encourage people to "exert the force to right wrongs".
As a school teacher, Hine was especially critical of the country's
child labour laws. Although some states
had enacted legislation designed to protect young workers, there were
no national laws dealing with this problem. In 1908 the National
Child Labour Committee employed Hine as their staff investigator
and photographer. This resulted in two books on the subject, Child
Labour in the Carolinas (1909) and Day
Laborers Before Their Time (1909).
Hine
travelled the country taking pictures of children working in factories.
In one 12 month period he covered over 12,000 miles. Unlike the photographers
who worked for Thomas Barnardo, Hine
made no attempt to exaggerate the poverty of these young people. Hine's
critics claimed that his pictures were not "shocking enough".
However, Hine argued that people were more likely to join the campaign
against child labour if they felt the photographs
accurately captured the reality of the situation.
Factory owners often refused Hine permission to take photographs and
accused him of muckraking. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera
and posed as a fire inspector. Hine worked for the National Child
Labour Committee for eight years. Hine told one audience: "Perhaps
you are weary of child labour pictures. Well, so are the rest of us,
but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired
of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labour
pictures will be records of the past."
In 1916 Congress eventually agreed to pass
legislation to protect children. As a result of the Keating-Owen
Act, restrictions were placed on the employment of children aged under
14 in factories and shops. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National
Child Labour Committee, wrote that: "the work Hine did for this
reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the
need to public attention."
After his
successful campaign against child labour,
Hine began working for the Red Cross during
the First World War. This involved him visiting
Europe where he photographed the living conditions of French and Belgian
civilians suffering from the impact of the war. After the Armistice
Hine went to the Balkans and in 1919 he published The
Children's Burden in the Balkans (1919).
In the 1920s Hine joined the campaign to establish better safety laws
for workers. Hine later wrote: "I wanted to do something positive.
So I said to myself, 'Why not do the worker at work? The man on the
job? At the time, he was as underprivileged as the kids in the mill."
In 1930-31 recorded the construction of the Empire State Building
which was later published as a book, Men
at Work (1932). This was followed by another assignment
from the Red Cross to photograph the consequences
of the drought in Arkansas and Kentucky. He was also employed by the
Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA)
to record the building of dams.
Hine had great difficulty earning enough money
from his photography. In January 1940, he lost his home after failing
to keep up repayments to the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Lewis
Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November,
1940.
Leo aged 8 working in a textile
factory in Tennessee in 1910.
Child
Labour Debate Activity (International School of Toulouse)
Child
Labour Simulation (Spartacus Educational)
(1)
Judith Mara Gutman, Lewis W. Hine (1967)
Hine
never tried hard for a single effect; he was usually not pictorially
dramatic and many of his photographs appeared flat - not shocking
enough for his contemporaries. The people in the photographs communicate
directly to us as if they were still alive. They spill out of their
historic reality to become part of our present. We see them and think
we are about to know them.
(2)
In 1909 Lewis Hine spoke at a social work conference on the subject
of photography and social reform.
Whether
it be a painting or photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings
one immediately into close touch with reality. In fact, it is often
more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture,
the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.
The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot
falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the
integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs
may not lie, liars may photograph.
John Dempsey aged eleven working
in a mule-spinning
room in Rhode Island in April 1909.
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