Lewis Hine

I mentioned Lewis Hine in another thread but thought that he deserves a thread of his own. Around 100 years ago, Hine was a school teacher in New York who was also an amateur photographer. He took many photographs documenting immigrants landing at Ellis Island and eventually gave up teaching and went into photojournalism. In 1908 he became a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and over the next decade worked to document child labour in America. His work as a photojournalist fostered real social change in America and resulted in new laws that greatly reduced the use of child labour in industry. Despite the quality of his photojournalism and the tremendous and positive social impact of his photographs, Hine could not find much work as a professional photographer later in his life. Unfortunately he later lived and died in the type of poverty that he often photographed.

The reason why Hine is so important is that his work serve as a great example why we should protect and never give up our current freedoms to shoot and publish our photographs. Child labour still exists and there are also many other injustices that can fought by raising awareness through the photographic medium.

Shorpy: The 100 Year Old Photo Blog is an excellent blog and I found a great collection of Hine's work there.

http://www.shorpy.com

Shorpy is actually the name of one of the child-labourers photographed by Lewis Hines.
http://www.shorpy.com/shorpy

Here is Shorpy's collection of Hine's photographs:
http://www.shorpy.com/lewis-hine-photos?page=1

Another website with a good collection of Hine's photographs:
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/

A video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tY1gk6J6zc

Hine's documenting immigrants on Ellis Island:
http://education.eastmanhouse.org/discover/kits/kit.php?id=8

The largest online collection of Hine's work:
http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/digitcoll.php

Personally, I find Hine's work astounding given what he had to work with. This was during a time prior to the 35mm camera. Hine took his photographs with huge, heavy and slow cameras and yet he could not afford to get caught. I also cannot think of a single photographer that made more of a social impact with his/her photographs than Lewis Hine did. Sadly, I think that there are lots of really good documentary photography going on and much of it with the same potential as the photography of Lewis Hine. Unfortunately, very little of it gets published mainly due to political and capitalist reasons. The fact is that photographs, for example, of the unimaginable nightmare caused by Chernobyl accident (that can also very well happen here in Canada) will not sell like paparazzi photographs showing how fat Jennifer Love Hewitt now looks in a bikini.

Thanks Nando. I am a big fan of old photographs and the history that goes with them. Awesome link.