Lewis Hine

"Power house mechanic working on steam pump," 1920

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 the child labor laws in the United States.

Early life

Lewis W. Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1874. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine 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. The classes traveled 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 eventually came to the realization that his vocation was photojournalism.

Photojournalism

Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory. Indiana, August 1908.

In 1906, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation. Here Hine photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called the Pittsburg Survey. In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor in American industry to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice.

Child laborers in glassworks. Indiana, 1908

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. Hine photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the iron and steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks the workers endured. In order to obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 feet above Fifth Avenue.

"Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal [i.e., Pownal] Cotton Mill. Vt."

During the Great Depression, he 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 (WPA) National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a member of the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand 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.

Later life of Lewis Hine

Raising the Mast, Empire State Building, 1932.

In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed.

The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to 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 at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.

After Lewis 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 but did not accept them; but the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York did.

Notable photographs

• Child Labor: Girls in Factory (1908)
• Breaker Boys (1910)
• Steam Fitter (1920)
• Workers, Empire State Building (1931)

See also

• Further works about Hine (from WorldCat)
• Further works about Hine (from WorldCat), online material only
• Further works by Hine (from WorldCat)
• Further works by Hine (from WorldCat), online material only
• House Calls, a documentary about physician and photographer Mark Nowaczynski, who was inspired by Hine to photograph elderly patients.
• Kate Sampsell-Willmann, Lewis Hine as Social Critic (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009).

External links

• Photo of Lewis Hine
• Library of Congress NCLC Prints & Photographs
• Lewis Hine Collection at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (5000 photos)
• Dozens of high-resolution Hine photos with the original captions
• Lewis Hine Project: Nationally known project to locate and interview descendants of child laborers photographed by Hine
• Lewis Hine : Immigration & The Progressive Era
• Youtube Video: "United States Child Labor, 1908-1920: As Seen Through the Lens of Sociologist and Photographer Lewis W. Hine"
• Lewis Hine, Selected Prints
• Teachinghistory.org review of web resource Child Labor in America, 1908-1912: Photographs of Lewis W. Hine