Giovanna M. Cucciniello
Lewis Hine was born in Wisconsin in 1874. His father died when he was only 16, forcing him to begin work at an early age. He left home to study educational theory at the University of Chicago, perhaps with John Dewey, and was encouraged by his friend, Frank Manny, to join him in New York as an assitant teacher of nature study and geography. He began photographing the immigrants on Ellis Island in 1905 and continued portraying their lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (in New York City) through the early decades of the century. (Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay, southwest of Manhattan, served as the main point of arrival for immigrants to the United States from 1892 to 1943.)
Lewis Hine is an important American photographer because he was able to capture the definitive realities of American life that we now take for granted: In
Climbing into the Land of Promise
, Ellis Island, 1905, the harsh and exhausted look of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; In
Children on Street
,
Lower East Side, N.Y.C
., the horrific conditions families were forced to live and work in, overcrowded homes and streets where children were left to fend for themselves. In
Looking for Lost Baggage
,
Ellis Island
, the images of the woman and children surrounded by their belongings amidst a mass of other lost immigrants evokes feeling of displacement and anxiety that anyone who travels, let alone moves, to a foreign country empathizes with.
Hine’s photographic career began in a period of social ferment and reform. In 1899 Florence Kelley had come to New York to administer the National Consumer League, with the Child Labor Committee, was to be the spearhead of the movement for protective legislation for woman and child workers. In 1908, he became a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and also for the magazine Charities and Commons, later called Survey. This magazine gave Hine his earliest support and publication. His photos of child laborers throughout the country and of working-class families in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York were meant to reveal, but also to educate. The plight of the newly arrived immigrant in seek of the American dream of wealth and prosperity brought an overwhelming sense of compassion as symbols of endurance and a country that would deliver on its promises. Photographing extremely poor and marginalized immigrants encouraged middle class reformers and wealthy philanthropists to come together and devise social reform legislation. Later in life, Hine was commissioned by The Farm Security Administration (FSA) to photograph the devastating images of the Depression in a photography project that later served as a guide for much of the New Deal policy.
Hine traveled across the United States photographing children working in factories and in one 12 month period he covered over 12,000 miles. Compared to other documentary photographers of the time his photographs were less shocking than they were accurate. To take such photos he sneaked into factories disguised as a fire inspector. He continued to bombard publications with his child labor photos until “ the whole country is so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past.”
In 1916, Congress passed legislation to protect children and restrictions were placed on the employment of children under 14 years of age in factories and shops. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National Child Labor Committee, wrote, “The work Hine did for this reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention.”
Hine began to work for the Red Cross during the First World War and visited Europe where he began to photograph the impact of the war on French and Belgian civilians. He then returned to the United States and in 1930-1931 photographed the construction of the Empire State Building, with one of his most famous photos entitled,
Men at Work
. The Red Cross hired him again to photograph the consequences of the drought in Arkansas and Kentucky. Despite these assignments he had difficulty earning enough money from this photography. In 1940 he lost his home after failing to pay loans and died on November 3rd, 1940 in extreme poverty.