Lewis Hine

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Lore & Background

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. Following the accidental death of his father, the teenaged Hine was forced to undertake a number of jobs to support his widowed mother and sisters. Aspiring to become an educator like his mother, Hine managed to save a portion of his earnings as the family breadwinner to pay for schooling at the University of Chicago, where he enrolled in 1900. While a student in Chicago, Hine met Frank Manny, a professor of education at the Normal School who was named superintendent of the Ethical Culture School in New York City in 1901. At Manny's invitation, Hine accepted a position as an assistant teacher and relocated to New York. There, he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. Hine also studied sociology at Columbia University and New York University. Hine led his sociology classes 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 came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform. In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey. In 1908, Hine left his teaching position to become the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with a focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits. Hine's work for the NCLC was often dangerous. As a photographer, he was frequently threatened with violence or even death by factory police and foremen. To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or even an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. 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. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. To obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue. At times, he remembered, he hung above the city with nothing below but 'a sheer drop of nearly a quarter-mile.' During the Great Depression, Hine, once 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. In 1936, Hine was selected as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment, but his work there was not completed. He was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage. Hine hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing repeatedly to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died on November 3, 1940, at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old.

Reader's Guide

Hine's photographs supported the NCLC's lobbying to end child labor, and in 1912 the Children's Bureau was created. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 eventually brought child labor in the US to an end. After 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 and did not accept them, but the George Eastman Museum did. In 1984, PBS produced a one-hour documentary, America and Lewis Hine, about Hine's life and work. The film was directed by Nina Rosenblum, written by Dan Allentuck and narrated by Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton, and John Crowley. In 2006, author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's historical fiction middle-grade novel Counting on Grace was published by Wendy Lamb Books. The latter chapters center on 12-year-old Grace and her life-changing encounter with Hine, during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to have many child laborers. On the cover is the iconic photo of Grace's real-life counterpart, Addie Card (1897–1993), taken during Hine's undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill. In 2016, Time published altered (colorized) versions of several of Hine's original photographs of child labor in the US. Hine's work is held in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (almost five thousand NCLC photographs), the George Eastman Museum (thousands of photographs and negatives), the Library of Congress (over 5,000 photographs), the New York Public Library, and the International Photography Hall of Fame.

Did You Know?

• Hine took over 200 plates (photographs) of immigrants at Ellis Island between 1904 and 1909.
• To document child labor, Hine disguised himself as a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or industrial photographer.
• In 1930, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue to photograph Empire State Building construction.
• Hine's son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951.
• The Museum of Modern Art was offered Hine's pictures and did not accept them, but the George Eastman Museum did.