Hine, Lewis Wickes

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Lewis Wickes Hine

During a career that spanned nearly four decades, photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) created some of the most unforgettable images of twentieth-century America.

Hine considered himself less an artist than a documentarian of both the social ills and industrial achievements in the United States. His photographs of children laboring in factories at the turn of the century helped sway public opinion in favor of new federal laws restricting the employment of minors. But Hine's bestknown work may be the series of photographs he took each day during the construction of New York City's majestic Empire State Building. “Hine's photographs sealed its status as a stunning human endeavor,” noted New York Times contributor Jim Rasenberger, “animating its steel and brick with something like soul.”

Hine was born on September 26, 1874, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as the last of three children of Douglas Hill Hine and Sarah Hayes Hine. His father ran a restaurant in Oshkosh, but earlier had been a sign painter and Union Army soldier. Hine quit school at age 15, though he later completed his education with night school classes while holding down various jobs. He found a mentor in the form of an Oshkosh educator named Frank A. Manny, who encouraged him to pursue teaching as a career. In 1900, the year he turned 26, Hine entered the University of Chicago.

Immortalized Ellis Island Immigrants

Hine moved to New York City when Manny was named head of the Ethical Culture School, a progressive school that prided itself on serving as an academy for children from the working classes, as well as those from wealthy families whose parents were keen on the ideals of social justice. Manny hired Hine to teach nature studies and geography, while Hine continued his education at both Columbia University and New York University. In 1905 he earned the equivalent of a master's degree in education from New York University, which was called a master in pedagogy (Pd.M.). By this point he had also married a woman from Oshkosh, Sara Ann Rich, with whom he would have a son, Corydon Lewis Hine.

Hine took his first photographs around 1903, when Manny gave him a camera to document classes and events at the Ethical Culture School. Hine was so intrigued by the medium that he began devoting much of his spare time to mastering it. From 1904 to 1909 he regularly visited Ellis Island, the debarkation point for the thousands of new immigrants to America who had often spent their life savings on the journey. Hine's images would later serve as a crucial witness to this period of U.S. history, with Antiques writer Barbara Head Millstein calling his work here “perhaps the most complete pictorial examination of the great tide of humanity that entered this country at the turn of the century.”

Hine quit his teaching job at the Ethical Culture School in 1908 in order to become a full-time photographer. Another of his most important photo essays was completed that year when he visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and photographed its impressive industrial architecture, particularly that of its steel plants. Back in New York City, he photographed the tenements where new immigrants lived, often in the most abject, squalid conditions. Many of these appeared in the magazine Charities and the Commons, which later changed its name to Survey but retained its focus as a journal of the settlement movement. This was a wellorganized mission to improve the lives of the poor by establishing neighborhood centers that offered such services as child care and English language lessons.

Depicted Children in Factories

Hine's work came to the attention of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a nonprofit organization set up in 1904 to end the practice of using children in factories and other workplaces. The use of children as menial laborers was an entirely legal practice at the time and would remain so well into the 1930s in many U.S. states. Like other progressive Americans, Hine was appalled at the conditions under which these youngsters toiled, often for a fraction of the wages paid to adults doing the same job. Not long after the NCLC received official government sanction to investigate and report on abuses, Hine was hired as its art director and began sneaking his camera into factories to document conditions. Taken on the sly in more than 20 different states, the photographs accompanied official reports submitted by the NCLC to bolster support for new labor laws—bitterly opposed by corporate America at the time—that would restrict what employers considered their right: to hire cheap child labor.

What made Hine's images all the more remarkable was that he never had permission from the employers to take the photographs, and instead talked his way into these workplaces by pretending to be a Bible salesperson or insurance agent. Once he made sure a manager was enough of a distance away, he quickly set up his camera on a tripod and snapped the shutter. At the time, this kind of indoor photography required the use of noxious flashlight powder, which left a cloud of telltale smoke. Hine would usually take some notes on the child's age, name, and job, often writing the details inside his pocket. Hine's images of boys working in the deadly coal mines in Pennsylvania and of little girls working the massive textile looms at cotton mills in the South were some of the first widely disseminated images of children at work in America. They were used for NCLC posters that featured slogans such as “Everybody Pays But Few Profit by Child Labor.”

The American public was fully aware that many children never went to school, instead being forced to enter the working world because of their family's dire poverty. In large cities, it was a common sight to see young children selling newspapers or other goods on street corners, but few newspaper readers had ever been inside a genuine industrial workplace, with its massive machinery, where children as young as six were employed in the filthy and often dangerous conditions, nor were they privy to the many homebased sewing businesses which were common in New York City at the time. “Because of Hine, comfortable middleclass Americans were forced to look at children embroidering lace in airless tenements on New York's Lower East Side [or] cutting sardines in Eastport, Maine,” wrote Elizabeth Winthrop in the Smithsonian.

Documented New Skyscraper

In 1918 Hine accepted a job offer from the American Red Cross to visually document the flood of refugees displaced in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. He spent several months between 1918 and 1919 shooting some 600 images, some of which were shown at exhibits he later organized for the American Red Cross Museum in Washington, D.C. Most of them, however, were lost for decades in the Red Cross archives until they were unearthed in the 1980s. They appeared in the 1988 volume Lewis Hine In Europe: The Lost Photographs by Daile Kaplan.

Hine preferred to call himself an interpretive photographer, a tag he seemed to have adopted not long after a 1920 show at the National Arts Club of New York City titled Interpretation of Social and Industrial Conditions Here and Abroad. But as the reform movement of the early decades of the twentieth century gave way to the postwar prosperity of the 1920s, Hine found himself out of step with the times. His only income came from freelance work over the next decade. In 1930 he was offered a job by an old friend named Belle Moskowitz (1877-1933), who had once been a New York City social worker and active in the settlement house movement. Moskowitz went on to a job as campaign manager for liberal New York State governor Al Smith (1873-1944) when he ran for the White House in 1928, but by 1930 she was serving as the publicist for New York City's most highly anticipated construction project, the Empire State Building.

At 102 stories, the Empire State Building was planned as the world's tallest building, and it kept that title for the first 40 years of its existence. Moskowitz offered Hine a job as the official photographer for the project, and he accepted. As the building's stories went up between May and November of 1930, he made a daily visual record of the construction. He was particularly fascinated by the ironworkers, who walked the beams without any fear of heights, and dubbed them the “sky boys.” Many were Irish immigrants, but some came from Mohawk Indian communities in upstate New York and Canada, and were known for what seemed to be a genetic predisposition for fearlessness in the air. Hine's own task was challenging: he took his heavy camera and tripod up with him as the stories climbed higher, and finally resorted to locking himself in a makeshift steel box suspended from a crane. One of his images near the end of the project showed a final rivet being driven in a girder. Among the images was the now-famous Icarus atop Empire State Building, which shows a worker suspended from a giant loop of cable so far up that the Hudson River and part of New Jersey are visible in the background.

Hine's Empire State photographs were published in book form in 1932 as Men at Work. He wrote in the book's introduction, “Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men. We call this the Machine Age. But the more machines we use the more do we need real men to make and direct them …. The more you see of modern machines, the more may you, too, respect the men who make them and manipulate them.” As Rasenberger wrote, “Hine gave the men a degree of honor and immortality that is rarely bestowed on blue-collar workers. They, in turn, lent his photographs their exhilarating pride and grace, and inspired some of the greatest work of his life.”

Worked for WPA

The rest of the 1930s were a moribund period for Hine and his camera. In 1933 he photographed Alabama dambuilding projects in Wilson and Muscle Shoals on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, but failed to receive credit when they were published. Between 1936 and 1937 he worked for the National Research Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency created to alleviate massive unemployment during the Great Depression via large-scale public-works projects. For the WPA he photographed Rural Electrification Administration sites in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State. Later in the decade he revisited the textile mills in North Carolina, New Hampshire, and other states he had photographed years before on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee. By contrast to his earlier images, “these later photographs are a poignant reminder that the worker was no longer simply a slave to the machine but had become subsumed by it,” wrote Millstein. “The assembly line had triumphed.”

One of Hine's last assignments, to depict life on America's railroads, came from Fortune magazine, and appeared in its June 1939 issue. In his last years, friends paid the rent on his house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he died after abdominal surgery on November 3, 1940. Decades later, as his work was rediscovered, his works began to rise significantly in value, some prints commanding as much as $50,000 at auction. In the late 1990s, an art world scandal over some of his prints erupted after rumors arose that Hine photographs purportedly sold as “vintage” prints had actually been printed from negatives long after Hine's death, by Walter Rosenblum, a young photographer he had once mentored.