Lewis Hine

A teacher learns to use the camera, 1874–1905

Lewis Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1874. He studied sociology at the University of Chicago and continued his studies at Columbia University in New York. By the early 1900s he was teaching at the Ethical Culture School. There he led students through commercial streets and tenement districts, using photography to help them examine the city beyond their classrooms. His early subjects included immigrants and people living in poverty.[1]

Hine moved to New York to teach in 1901. His photographs of families arriving at Ellis Island addressed the hostility immigrants encountered in the United States. He wanted viewers to recognize the people entering the country as individuals. The arrivals became one of his first sustained photographic projects, connecting the camera work he had begun as a teacher with the investigation of social conditions that would occupy his career.[2]

Investigating child labor, 1908–1916

In 1908 Hine left teaching to photograph for the National Child Labor Committee. He traveled to coal mines, textile mills, canneries, and meatpacking plants, as well as streets where children sold newspapers or shined shoes. Factory managers sometimes refused him access. Hine used false pretenses to get inside and interviewed children while concealing his notes in a pocket. Recording ages, hours, and working conditions was part of the assignment, alongside making the photographs.[3]

The National Child Labor Committee distributed Hine's pictures through reports, newspapers, exhibitions, and projected slide shows. In 1913 he became head of its exhibits department. A photograph could therefore reach readers in print and appear before audiences at a public presentation. His work involved deciding how evidence would be displayed, as well as gathering it. The committee's surviving collection includes exhibition panels, captions, and photographs of the displays themselves.[4]

The campaign for federal child-labor restrictions continued through legislative setbacks. Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, but the Supreme Court struck it down in 1918. Federal protections later formed part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Hine's photographs contributed to a much longer campaign by the National Child Labor Committee and other reformers. They should not be credited with changing the law on their own.[5]

Photographs and the written record

The National Child Labor Committee's photographs from 1908–1924 often came with captions recording a child's name, age, address, task, working hours, and pay. Read alongside the picture, these details distinguish particular jobs and circumstances. The Library of Congress also cautions that the old caption cards can contain mistakes or unclear handwriting. Their information is historical evidence to examine, with its limitations, rather than a guarantee that every reported age or identification is correct.[4]

In his child-labor investigations, which began in 1908, Hine understood that the photographer's decisions shaped what an audience saw. The National Archives records his description of the process as photo-interpretation. He insisted on accurate supporting information and rejected retouching or fabrication. His approach combined the selection of a telling scene with written details explaining who was in it and what work they did.[3]

Relief work and industrial photography, 1918–1930

In 1918 Hine joined the American Red Cross, and he continued doing freelance work for the organization into the 1930s. His career also included industrial commissions and photographic essays for periodicals. The New York Public Library preserves his pictures of Pittsburgh steel mills and workers in a collection dating from approximately 1908 to 1921. Across these assignments, Hine repeatedly returned to working people and their surroundings.[6][7]

Around 1920 Hine began promoting his studio as a place for interpretive photography, emphasizing his choices as an image maker. His industrial portraits included the mechanic at a steam pump photographed in 1920. The International Center of Photography later exhibited that picture alongside his street scenes, child-labor studies, and construction photographs, showing the range of projects within his documentary practice.[6][8]

Photographing the Empire State Building, 1930–1932

In 1930 Hine was hired to document construction of the Empire State Building. He made more than a thousand photographs as the structure rose above New York. The men assembling its steel frame became central subjects. Their positions on the beams made the scale of the work visible, while their tools and movements showed the labor involved in building the tower.[9]

Photographing the Empire State Building required Hine to work at the same heights as its construction workers. In a letter dated November 25, 1930, he described being swung out in a box from the hundredth floor to photograph the tower. Several construction photographs appeared in his 1932 book Men at Work, intended for young readers. The building photographs joined his wider account of people performing skilled industrial work.[9]

Seeking commissions and preserving the work, 1931–1940

Hine's later correspondence records the difficulty of finding commissions. Letters from 1931 to 1939, preserved at the George Eastman Museum, include requests to friends for contacts and recommendations. His papers also contain drafts for a career retrospective commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation. These documents preserve his efforts to secure new work and to explain the photographs he had already made.[10]

Hine died on November 3, 1940, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, aged 66. By then he had spent decades photographing American workers, immigrant families, and the conditions in which children labored. Berenice Abbott's portrait of him, made around 1938 and now held by the National Portrait Gallery, records his appearance near the end of his life.[1][11]

The archive and later exhibitions

Hine's reputation continued to develop through the preservation and exhibition of his work. In 2014 the George Eastman Museum presented a retrospective containing more than 150 original prints from 1905 to 1937, with posters and period publications. The exhibition had traveled through Madrid, Paris, Rotterdam, and New York before reaching Rochester. Showing those publications beside the prints restored the settings in which audiences first encountered his photographs, including campaigns about housing, child labor, and relief after the First World War.[12]