Lewis Hine

The Mill - Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine is another of my favourite American photographers. Hine's early work, around 1905, was concerned with working conditions in the steel industry. As he travelled, he became more interested in child labour, from around 1908 - 1912 - so much so that he left his job as a teacher in order to become an investigative journalist for the National Child Labor Committee.

Hine is now regarded as a master photographer, and rightly so. His images of children, often in terrible working environments, are still powerful today. Occasionally, we see images of sweatshop factories in Asia - but I still haven't seen anything as powerful as those shot by Hine. Some of his images are, admittedly, posed - probably including the example above - but it makes a powerful statement. The girl in this image is only 11 years old, and claimed that she had already been working in the mill for a year. This was unusual - most children told Hine that they were 14 (the legal working age of the time), or that they were just "helping out" casually. It seems remarkable that Hine was able to gain access to all the factories and mills as he did.

Hine died in poverty in 1940, with only one book published in his lifetime, documenting the construction of the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, it is his early images that he is best remembered for. Hine was never regarded much as a photographer within his lifetime - just as a sociologist and campaigner. Today, his images are powerful statements - masterful documentary images in every sense. His legacy was the abandonment of child labour in America. For this reason, Hine deserves his place among the great photographers.

For more of Hine's images, see the online collection held by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where around 5000 of his images of child poverty can be seen.