Lewis HINE | Press Release
Social Consciousness &
Next Generation: The Heirs of Lewis HINE
September 6-October 18, 2013
There have always been photographers around whom evolutionary forces revolve. They distill
and synthesize much of what preceded them, and then somehow, nothing is the same after
them. They are nexus points around which changes occur, and they serve as a Polaris, pointing
the way. Eugene Atget took topographic records of every obvious detail of a Paris that was
changing every day before his eyes to the nth degree as the Metros were being built. He added
his own poignant ability to mourn the loss of a place in advance of its demise, and gave us an
extended visual eulogy for the city he loved, based on its pieces. His record was partly due to an
acute attention to detail, and partly a result of his deployment of an overlay of modernist
reductive abstraction which lived inside the detail. Atget’s modernism ran almost throughout
his work, but was almost invisible, because it was hidden by all the detail. But once you saw it,
you knew it was no accident. For years people thought Atget was a quaint, retro photographer,
when actually he was the avant-garde. After the Realism of Zola and before William Carlos
Williams could tell us that there was “no meaning but in things”, Atget was assembling his
wonderfully diverse catalogue of architecture, streets, ornamental details and commercial
signage. Could Abbott, or Evans, or arguably Edward Weston been who they were without
Atget quietly showing the way… a way that demonstrated how unnecessary it was to choose
between description and expression? I doubt it. And so, as Paris built its Metro, 20th century
photography was born.
So too it was with Lewis Hine. Hine did not invent Social Documentary photography… there
were all those war records: Mexico vs. Texas, The Crimea, The Indian Mutiny, The American
Civil War. But those were conflict events, specific to their time and place, yet generally not
revealing of ongoing social conditions. John Thomson, on the other hand, in his Street Life in
London (1876-77), did record the continuing plight of the London near-poor, and their struggle
to survive, performing menial yet only marginally remunerative jobs.
Then, a decade and a half later, Jacob Riis did much the same thing for the denizens of New
York’s Lower East Side, in his landmark book, How the Other Half Lives (1890); he showed the
true squalor of New York’s tenements. Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun, continued his
consciousness raising campaign, and was a contributor to the forces that got building codes
changed, and many parks and playgrounds built all around the city, making it possible for
children to play in safer environments than the streets.
So, by the time Lewis Wickes Hine shows up, just after the turn of the century, as a budding
sociologist, studying the influx of immigrants at Ellis Island (my family included), there was
precedent for photography’s use as a tool for bringing about social change. Hine sharpened
that tool to a fine edge, and knew exactly how to apply it.
After photographing the immigrant experience of the vetting process at Ellis Island, he became
curious about what happened to these people after they were officially ‘approved’ and
deposited on the mean streets of New York. Of course they were swallowed up by Riis’
tenements, which hadn’t changed much in the seventeen years since the publication of his
muckraking book. As Hine photographed them in their new dwellings, and followed them in
their daily lives, both in the slums and on the streets…he discovered the insidious tragedy of
child labor. Poor families would not send their children even to free public schools, because the
few pennies they could bring in to the household, by being put to work, was crucial in making
ends meet. Children who were denied school were essentially denied a future. Work was
grueling and of long hours, and physical danger was ever-present. The National Child Labor
Committee, which was working to get anti child labor laws enacted by Congress and the States,
thought it would be a good idea to use photography as a means of persuasion. When the NCLC
saw Hine’s work, they hired him in 1908 to work full-time for them. Hine certainly believed in
the cause and in photography’s potential role in forming public opinion around it. What he did
was find specific visual strategies that would not only tell the story, but would tug hard at the
heartstrings of the public, and get them firmly on the “right” side of the child labor issue. To do
this the picture had to be constructed to produce a knee-jerk response in the viewer. Showing
angelic children dressed in rags would not be enough. What he did was to create a visual syntax
of persuasion that became the common coin of editorial photo-journalism. His child subjects
were usually somewhat attractive, and yet because of their hard lives seemed a bit older than
their years. They often seemed a bit confused, disoriented or bewildered by their environment.
They looked tired. They often were barefoot and wore clothes that were dirty, and torn. The
straight lines of those tears looked like they had been made by the machines on which they
worked. Luckily, at least for now, the delicate flesh beneath those clothes had been spared. Yet
those machines towered over these little people. In order to work on the machines designed
for grown adults, the children had to clamber around on them, with their rapidly spinning parts,
inches from their bare and vulnerable hands and feet. These perches were clearly precarious,
and the pictures looked like grisly accidents waiting to happen…and they sometimes did. The
worst part was that the children were trapped in a world clearly not of their making. Hine
demonstrated this geometrically by placing his subjects half-way down a long row of looms or
bobbin machines, whose height and deep vanishing-point perspective seemed to literally
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capture the child in a giant spider’s web of whirring machines. It was as deliberate as it was
effective.
The National Child Labor Committee made Hine’s photographs available free to anyone willing
to publish them. Certainly they told the story the NCLC wanted told. Hine, an experienced
lecturer, made lantern slides from some of the negatives and gave lectures all over the country.
Tri-fold exhibition panels were designed using enlarged photographs and headline text shouting
and showing the horrors of child labor and extolling the sanctity of childhood. The panels would
be displayed at important public gatherings, such as state fairs and even the 1915 Panama
Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco where The National Child Labor Committee took a booth and
filled it with panels. Volunteers collected signatures on petitions which supported passage of
child-labor legislation. These precepts eventually were written into laws forbidding children
under 16 from working. Now, with their children back at school, many poor families suffered
greatly without the children’s income, so much so that the welfare system had to be instituted
to make up the difference.
The Next Generation: Because Hine influenced so many by his examples we make our
complementary online exhibition about the generation of photographers who followed Hine.
Hine was considered by many young photographers in New York in the 1930s as the model for
the photographer with a conscience. The members of the Photo-League (Siskind, Grossman,
Rosenblum, et. al) revered Hine and often asked him to lecture there. When Hine died his
negatives and prints were physically stored at the Photo-League offices and the League’s efforts
helped save Hine’s legacy. Paul Strand, a student of Hine’s, published pictures of street people
in Camera Work in 1915 and 1917, and went on to have a major career as a social documentary
photographer and filmmaker. Although Roy Stryker thought Hine was too radical to work for his
FSA, many FSA photographers credited Hine with being the model they emulated, through his
example of concern, research, traveling long distances, and staying in a location long enough to
engage in the lives of his subjects. One can easily make the case that Hine’s dedication and
visual awareness continued to influence photographers through the founding of the great
weekly journals (LIFE magazine1936 and Look Magazine 1937) and their prime photographers,
Bourke-White, Eisenstaedt, Smith, Mydans, Capa, and Chim. The emulation of this editorial
vision culminated in the more hybridized personal journalism of Robert Frank, and eventually
led to the creation of the Concerned Photographer Foundation which became the International
Center of Photography which today still carries that ‘concerned’ torch. It’s a long lineage which
began with Hine’s curiosity about the fate of immigrants, and wound up by ending child labor
abuses. But more importantly all this happened because Hine redefined and pushed the
boundaries of photography’s ability to persuade into an effective force for change. In fact the
International Center of Photography, as if to prove the point, is having an exhibition of Hine’s
work running concurrently with ours. Come see both.
-Alan Klotz
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