Lewis Hine (1874–1940)

Lewis Hine

Taken nearly a hundred years ago, Lewis Hine's photographs linger. Images of breaker boys and loom workers remind us how far we've come and how far we have to go to protect children from exploitation. Hine believed in photography as a tool for social change. His birthday would have been this Thursday, September 26th.

Lewis Hine began working for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1908 and remained with the organization for a decade. Without the committee's work, and Hine's contribution, there would be few laws protecting children from exploitation in the workplace. Further, Hine's images continue to shape our notions of human dignity and value. Moreover, the work asserts a more subtle argument that many still resist: that childhood, a state distinct from adulthood with its own peculiar virtues and needs, should be nurtured as an inalienable right for all.

Before working for the NCLC, Hine contributed to the (then new) field of the social sciences. Statistics and photography both taught us how to look at ourselves differently. Hine documented economic disparities and working class life for the groundbreaking Pittsburgh Survey, a benchmark case study that continues to serve as a reference in the field. Curiously, over the next hundred years, photographers and filmmakers would follow Hine's example and the Steel City would become a touch stone, an exemplar, a litmus bearing out America's ability to succeed and fail.

W. Eugene Smith and Teenie Harris both photographed Pittsburgh, though to different ends. Smith, an outsider, was obsessed with orchestrating an epic narrative with Pittsburgh as a subject: a singular masterpiece barely realized and ultimately forsworn; while Harris worked as a photojournalist and studio photographer and kept his feet on the ground. Pittsburgh was home to Harris, not an ideal. From his base on Wylie Avenue, Harris traveled far and wide documenting social change.

Filmmakers Stan Brackhage and Hollis Frampton gravitated towards impressionistic experimental investigations of blast-furnaces and morgues, while John Marshall's revolutionary vérité projects revealed the mechanization of law enforcement and cops on the beat. And for the last thirty years, filmmaker Tony Buba has been chronicling the rise and fall of Braddock PA and the survival of its residents, while his neighbor, photographer LaToya Ruby Fraizer, hangs her indelible portraits of friends and family at the Brooklyn Museum.

Documentary photography and filmmaking occupy odd spaces between art and utility. Execution and intent in these genres doesn't succumb to easy definition. And there is more at stake than academic punditry.

Lewis Hine was not so much a photo-journalist as an agitator and artist. His work was calculated to ignite a specific emotional response. Hine himself expressed an acute understanding of image making:

The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. — Lewis Hine

The dirt on their faces, their ill-fitting clothes and grim surroundings contrast with ennobled features and pride. Light falls perfectly. The stillness creates a freeze, indelible and timeless. Hine was hardly the spontaneous photographer. He knew how to hold the spectator and illicet sympathy.

One of Hine's portraits

In my novel, THE LAST SURVEY, photographer and lobbyist, John Schuler, follows in Hine's footsteps. But as the story begins, two decades have passed and the country is in a very different place. Many of the changes Hine envisioned bore fruit: Child labor in the United States is becoming increasingly hard to find. Ironically, the Depression contributes to this statistical drop as low paying jobs are being horded by desperate adults. But flimsy laws insure that the institutions that exploit children will continue to do so as long as it's economically valid, and preservation of the institution of "childhood" is still not the cultural norm.

James E. Sidel: Shrimp Pickers/Texas (click to enlarge)

Schuler records what he sees. He is a pragmatist as much as a quixotic dreamer. The antithesis of Hine's delicate portraits, Schuler's images are raw and fast, unsettled and undignified. Figures smear, expressions and sentiments are lost. The proliferation of images is as important as the content. Less art and more data. One of the tensions in the novel, (albeit, a subtle theme), is the photographer's desire to push his art, to see more or tell more with his photographs. Perhaps this is a problem resulting from pride or narcissism, but the idea of creating a thing of beauty may be Schuler's white whale.

We are more sophisticated, in some respects, than the average person of 1908. We grasp many of the illusory techniques of the photographer. The lexicon isn't foreign to us. The field is not as specialized. But in our cynicism, we retain a naivete, an ignorance that is just as soundless as the buoyant romanticism of progressives like Hine, who (let's face it) implemented revolutionary change through actualizing their beliefs. The danger as always is cynicism, or the cynistist's belief that their lens has been polished to clarity. Indeed, there is a romance to being a cynic, a posturing and coolness as calculated as the romantic's. Danger lurks in the assumption that hope is for the feeble. 

 

        “The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are filled with passionate intensity.”—Yeats