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Lewis Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940) was an American sociologist and muckraker photographer. His photographs were instrumental in bringing about the passage of the first child labor laws in the United States.[1]

Lewis Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine

(1874-09-26)September 26, 1874

November 3, 1940(1940-11-03) (aged 66)

Documentary; social realism

Later life[edit]

In 1936, 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. Hine hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing repeatedly to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused.[9] 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.[10]

Legacy[edit]

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 labour in the US to an end.[5]


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.[11]


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[12] (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.[13]

Chicago, IL[14]

Art Institute of Chicago

of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County – almost five thousand NCLC photographs[15]

Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery

– thousands of photographs and negatives

George Eastman Museum

– over 5,000 photographs, including examples of Hine's child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images.

Library of Congress

New York[16]

New York Public Library

St.Louis, MO[17]

International Photography Hall of Fame

Hine's work is held in the following public collections:

Young in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910)[18]

Doffers

Newsies at Skeeter's Branch (1910)

Steam Fitter (1920)

Workers, Empire State Building (1931)

Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory. Indiana (1908)

Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory. Indiana (1908)

Empire State Building worker in 1931

Empire State Building worker in 1931

Raising the Mast, Empire State Building (1932)

Raising the Mast, Empire State Building (1932)

(2006 film), a documentary about physician and photographer Mark Nowaczynski, who was inspired by Hine to photograph elderly patients.[19]

House Calls

Freedman, Russell. Kids at work: Lewis Hine and the crusade against child labor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994).

Macieski, Robert. Picturing class: Lewis W. Hine photographs child labor in New England (2015)

online

Sampsell-Willmann, Kate. Lewis Hine as social critic (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009).

excerpt

| University of Illinois

Lewis Wickes Hine

| National Archives

Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor

| University of Missouri

David Joseph Marcou, 'Lewis Wickes Hine, 1874–1940: A Biographical Essay, with Photographs by Lewis Wickes Hine