A girl stands between a towering row of spinning frames, which dwarf her tiny stature. A gang of boys, dressed in the dusty uniform of the coal miner, stare blankly into the camera. Three grim-faced girls stand outside the cannery where they shuck oysters for a living.
These are some of the photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine, a teacher-turned-photographer who spent 1908 to 1924 travelling the United States to document child labor.
His story has been retold this week by the Alliance for American Manufacturing as part of its Unsung Heroes series. It’s a clear reminder of what photography can achieve for a cause.
Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1874. As a teenager, he had to work long hours to support his family after his father died. But he kept up his education and, in 1901, moved to New York to work as a teacher.
He first picked up a camera as a teaching tool. He took his students to Ellis Island and photographed newly arrived immigrants. According to the Smithsonian, he wanted to counter growing anti-immigrant feeling by showing them as “brave, dignified pioneers of a new land”. Realising that documentary photography could be a great tool for reform, he volunteered for a major project for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a campaigning body.
At the time, many American children worked in textile mills, mines, factories, canneries and fields, often in dangerous conditions and for long hours. Hine travelled across the country to photograph them.
To get access, he adopted a range of disguises, posing variously as a fire inspector, a postcard seller, a Bible salesman and a photographer who was only interested in machinery. This was risky work: Hine was often threatened by foremen and factory police.
The NCLC used the pictures in its lobbying campaign, and the federal Children’s Bureau was set up in 1912. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally brought the practice of child labor in the US to an end.
Continuing to crusade
Hine’s went on to photograph the Red Cross’s relief work in Europe during and after World War One. Back in the US, he made a series of “work portraits” celebrating the dignity of industrial workers.
Most famously, in 1930 he documented the construction of the Empire State Building. To get a good angle, he was swung out in a specially designed basket, 1,000ft above Fifth Avenue. His final years, sadly, were troubled ones. Commissions dried up, interest in his work faded, and he lost his house and had to apply for welfare. He died in 1940, aged 66.
Hine called his pictures “photo-interpretations”, which emphasized his personal involvement, as opposed to professional detachment. It was an approach that influenced generations of documentary photographers. And today, more than a century later, his images remind us that a camera, in the right hands, can help change the world.
