Lewis Hine

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(b Oshkosh, WI, 26 Sept 1874; d Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 4 Nov 1940). American photographer. Following several years as a factory worker in Oshkosh, and a short period at the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology and pedagogy (1900-01), he went to New York to teach at the Ethical Culture School (1901-8). There he acquired a camera as a teaching tool and soon set up a club and ran classes at the school, while improving his own skills as a self-taught photographer. In 1904 Hine's interest in social issues led him to document newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island as a way of demonstrating their common humanity, for example Young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island (1905; see Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 43). Thereafter he sought to demonstrate the efficacy of the photograph as a truthful witness, accepting commissions from social-work agencies. Towards the end of the first decade he became official photographer on the Pittsburgh Survey, a seminal investigation of America's archetypal industrial city, producing such images as Tenement House and Yard (1907-8; Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 56).

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Hine, Lewis Wickes (1874-1940), American sociologist and documentary photographer, born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he studied at the State Normal School, completed courses in drawing and sculpture, and worked in a factory before studying sociology at Chicago University in 1900. A self-taught photographer, he moved to New York in 1901, becoming an instructor in nature studies and official photographer to the Ethical Culture School. In 1905, informed by his training in sociology, and with his reformist interests sharpened by his experiences at the school, he began using the camera to study social problems by recording the arrival of immigrants at Ellis Island. These images led the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to hire him in 1906 for its campaign to ban child labour in agriculture, the canning and textile industries, mining, and other places progressive reformers regarded as unsafe or morally unfit for children. While working for the NCLC, he completed his master's degree in sociology at Columbia University (1907). He first published his photographs with accompanying text as an essay in Charities and Commons, later better known as Survey magazine, in whose pages his passionate opposition to child labour appeared regularly. Between 1908 and 1918 the NCLC sent Hine throughout the eastern states to document the prevalence of the problem. Using flash photography techniques pioneered by Jacob Riis, he documented young boys working underground in coal mines in Pennsylvania. Plant managers at southern textile mills tried to exclude him from their premises. Always he accompanied his images, intended for use in posters, pamphlets, lantern lectures, and other NCLC campaign media, with detailed captions describing working conditions, the ages of the children, and, if possible, their wages. Hine also did occasional photographic work for the American Red Cross between 1910 and 1914, and between 1918 and 1920 documented post-war conditions in the Balkans, Italy, and Greece, images which became part of The Human Cost of War (1920).

Hine began to receive recognition as a photographer rather than simply as a reformer in 1919, when his first one-man show was mounted. He continued to work as a photographer and photo director for Survey 1922-9, and for the Red Cross. Notwithstanding his standing as a reformer and photographer, his experience photographing construction of the Empire State Building, New York (1931), and the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) and Rural Electrification Administration (1934-5), Roy Stryker did not hire him for the FSA's monumental documentary photographic effort. Instead Hine became photographic director of the National Research Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Though equally fine, these images are much less widely known than his pioneering child labour photographs.

— Constance B. Schulz

Bibliography

• Gutman, J. M., Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience (1967).
• Gutman, J. M., Lewis W. Hine, 1874-1940 (1974).
• America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904-1940, text by A. Trachtenberg (1977)

Hine, Lewis (Lewis Wickes Hine), 1874-1940, American photographer, b. Oshkosh, Wis. Hine dedicated much of his photographic career, which began shortly after he bought his first camera in 1903, to exposing in sharp, painful images the social evils of the industrial revolution in the United States. He photographed the poverty of newly arrived immigrants and the street and factory life of working children. Many of these were published in such early collections as Charities and the Commons (1908) and Day Laborers before Their Time (1909). Hine's visual emphasis on their plight helped to bring about the passage of child-protection legislation in 1916. Hines also detailed the effects of war on the land and people of Europe, the complex relationship of man and machine, the construction of the Empire State Building (Men at Work, 1932), the effects of drought in the South, and the influence of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam program on the life of a rural community. Hine's work reflects concern, compassion, and a crusading idealism. The power of his images placed him at the forefront of 20th-century documentary photographers.

Bibliography

See International Museum of Photography, Lewis Wicke Hine's Interpretive Photography: The Six Early Projects (1978).

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