Lewis Hine American, 1874-1940

Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940) used photography as an instrument of social reform, creating one of the foundational bodies of American documentary work. A sociologist before he became a photographer, he never separated the two disciplines. His photographs were made to expose inadequate housing, combat child labor and advocate for the people they depicted. They retain their force today for the same reasons they did in his own time.

Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1874, Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. While teaching at the Ethical Culture School in New York, he took up photography as a classroom tool. In 1905, he began photographing arrivals at Ellis Island, making portraits of immigrants at the moment of entry that presented each sitter as an individual rather than a type.

In 1908, Hine began working for the National Child Labor Committee. Over the following sixteen years, he travelled throughout the country, from the Carolina Piedmont to the Gulf Coast and the Midwest, sometimes covering as much as thirty thousand miles in a year. He photographed children working in canneries, mills, sweatshops, mines and fields, as well as on the streets. He recorded their names and ages and transcribed their accounts, making the captions an integral part of the work. The photographs became a powerful instrument in the campaign against child labor, contributing to the movement that led to the establishment of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 and, ultimately, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Hine also photographed the Hull House district in Chicago. After the First World War, he worked for the American Red Cross in Europe and the Balkans. In 1930 and 1931, he climbed the rising steel framework of the Empire State Building to photograph the men constructing it, at times suspended above them in a specially made basket. Published as Men at Work in 1932, these images celebrated the skill and physical courage of industrial laborers. The photograph commonly known as Icarus, depicting a worker high atop the structure, remains his best-known image.

Recognition came too late. Hine died in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in 1940, with his work largely neglected. His son, Corydon, offered the prints and negatives to The Museum of Modern Art, which declined them. The archive instead passed to the Photo League and, following its dissolution in 1951, to George Eastman House.