Background
Lewis Hine was born on September 26, 1874 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, United States.
(Hines's photographs of children at work were so devastati...)
Hines's photographs of children at work were so devastating that they convinced the American people that Congress must pass child labor laws.
https://www.amazon.com/Kids-Work-Lewis-Crusade-Against/dp/0395797268/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Lewis+Hine&qid=1580286270&sr=8-2
1998
(Photographer, teacher, and sociologist Lewis W. Hine shap...)
Photographer, teacher, and sociologist Lewis W. Hine shaped our consciousness of American working life in the early 20th century like no other. Combining his training as an educator with his humanist concerns, Hine was one of the earliest photographers to use the camera as a documentary tool, capturing in particular labor conditions, housing, and immigrants arriving on Ellis Island. His images, including those of children in cotton mills, factories, coal mines, and fields, became icons of photographic history that helped to transform labor laws in the United States. This book brings together a representative collection of Lewis W. Hine’s photography from all periods of his work. It spans his earliest forays into social-documentary work through to his more artistic and interpretative late photographs, including his phenomenal images of the construction of the Empire State Building and his symbiotic staging of human and machine as a comment on increasing industrialization.
https://www.amazon.com/Lewis-W-Hine-America-English/dp/3836572346/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Lewis+Hine&qid=1580286202&sr=8-1
Lewis Hine was born on September 26, 1874 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, United States.
After his father was killed in an accident, Lewis Hine began working and saved his money for a college education. He studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University.
Lewis Hine became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. He led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Lewis 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, Lewis 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 Lewis Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, he documented child labor, with 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. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but also posed a serious threat to the industry. To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Lewis 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, Lewis Hine photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he made a series of "work portraits," which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, Lewis 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, he was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue.
During the Great Depression Lewis he 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. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Lewis Hine was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
In 1936, Lewis Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed.
The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage. Lewis 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 Lewis Hine lost his house and applied for welfare.
Lewis Hine died on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old.
(Hines's photographs of children at work were so devastati...)
1998(Photographer, teacher, and sociologist Lewis W. Hine shap...)
Power house mechanic working on steam pump
1920Child laborers in glasswork, Indiana
1908Climbing into the Promised Land Ellis Island
Soldier Thrown in Air
1917Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory, Indiana
1908Adolescent Girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill
1908Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal
1910Pennsylvania coal breakers
1912Empire State Building worker
1931Raising the Mast, Empire State Building
1931