Lewis Hine

• Name — Lewis Wickes Hine • Birth Name — Lewis Wickes Hine • Born — 26 September 1874 • Birthplace — Oshkosh, Wisconsin, U.S. • Died — 3 November 1940 • Place of death — Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S. • Field — Social reform • Education — University of Chicago Columbia University New York University • Movement — Documentary; social realism • Patrons — Russell Sage Foundation National Child Labor Committee Works Projects Administration

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. Following the accidental death of his father, the teenaged Hine was forced to undertake a number of jobs to support his widowed mother and sisters. Aspiring to become an educator like his mother, Hine managed to save a portion of his earnings as the family breadwinner to pay for schooling at the University of Chicago, where he enrolled in 1900. While a student in Chicago, Hine met Frank Manny, a professor of education at the Normal School who was named superintendent of the Ethical Culture School in New York City in 1901. At Manny's invitation, Hine accepted a position as an assistant teacher and relocated to New York. There, he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. Hine also studied sociology at Columbia University and New York University. • Illustration — Brooklyn Museum – Climbing into the Promised Land Ellis Island Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, 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 1936, Hine was selected as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment, but his work there was not completed. He was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. 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. 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.

• Illustration — A Little Spinner, Mollohan Mills, S.C. (1908) • Illustration — A trio of young cigarmakers. Florida (1909) • Illustration — Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory. Indiana (1908) • Illustration — Empire State Building worker in 1931 • Illustration — Newsboys smoking. Skeeter's Branch, St. Louis (1910) • Illustration — Raising the Mast, Empire State Building (1932)

In 1907, 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. • Illustration — Child laborers in glasswork. Indiana, 1908 • Illustration — Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning Co. (Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 1911) In 1908, Hine left his teaching position to become the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with a 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, 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. • Illustration — Soldier Thrown in Air, 1917, National Gallery of Art During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of "work portraits", which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, 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, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue. At times, he remembered, he hung above the city with nothing below but "a sheer drop of nearly a quarter-mile." • Illustration — "Power house mechanic working on steam pump" (1920) During the Great Depression, Hine, once 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.

• Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910) • Newsies at Skeeter's Branch (1910) • Steam Fitter (1920)

Hine's work is held in the following public collections: • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois • Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County – almost five thousand NCLC photographs • George Eastman Museum – thousands of photographs and negatives • Library of Congress – over 5,000 photographs, including examples of Hine's child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. • New York Public Library, New York • International Photography Hall of Fame, St. Louis, Missouri