Lewis Hine
				American, 1874-1940
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Although Lewis Hine was neither the first-nor certainly the last-photographer to employ his camera in the cause of social reform, the quality of his best work has rarely been equaled. Even more importantly, Hine's documentation of child labor was instrumental in effecting the reforms for which he struggled. Allied with many of the important figures of the Progressive and Reform movements, Hine was able to use his photographs to mobilize public concern and to generate corrective legislation. Born in Wisconsin, Hine attended the University of Chicago for a year. In 1901 he came to New York, where his friend Frank A. Manny, Superintendent of the Ethical Culture School, engaged him to teach nature study and geography. In 1904 he began a photographic documentation of immigrants arriving and being processed on Ellis Island, a project he worked on for the next five years. Using magnesium powder flash, he photographed families, individuals, the facilities on the island. Shortly after meeting with Arthur Kellogg, the editor of the reformist social work journal Charity and the Commons, Hine was engaged as a freelance photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Under the aegis of the NCLC, Hine traveled widely, photographing (often surreptitiously) children working in the mines, factories, and sweatshops of the northeast, the southeast, and the mid-Atlantic states. These photographs were reproduced in newspapers, within NCLC publications, and rented out in stereopticon slide format with accompanying lectures. During this same period, Hine photographed slum conditions in Washington, D.C., conditions in various industries, and street trades in Connecticut. By the beginning of World War 1, Hine had achieved considerable fame as a photographer, social worker, and reformer. Traveling constantly, photographing, recording, gathering information, Hine considered his activities as a form of evidence for the present and history for the future. In 1918 he joined the American Red Cross. Sent to Europe, he photographed the living conditions of French and Belgian civilians reeling from the ravages of the war. Upon returning to New York, Hine made the photographs available to The Survey magazine with the hope of publicizing the devastation he had witnessed. From 1922 to 1929, Hine was compelled to diversify his photographic activities. These included the acceptance of commercial assignments as well as some experimentation with art photography. Nonetheless, he was able to return to Ellis Island in 1926 to make a new series of photographs of immigrants, and also to continue an ongoing series of photographs of working people and craftsmen. In 1930, Hine photographed the construction of the Empire State Building; a selection of these images appeared two years later as a picture book intended for adolescents entitled Men at Work. In 1931, Hine received an assignment from the American Red Cross to photograph the drought-ridden rural communities of Arkansas and Kentucky. A portfolio of mill workers entitled Through the Loom produced in 1933 was exhibited at the World's Fair and brought Hine to the attention of TVA officials, who commissioned him to photograph construction activities at two dam sites. In the mid-1930s, Hine tried in vain to work for Roy Stryker's FSA photography project. His financial circumstances seem to have worsened considerably through the 1930s, and he was unable to secure grants from either the Carnegie Corporation or the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1938, however, Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland became interested in his work and arranged for several articles and retrospective exhibitions. The magnitude of Hine's accomplishment is now undisputed. From the earliest photographs of newly arrived immigrants, through the relentless "documents" of child labor, to the heroic images of workers constructing the newly rising skyscrapers, Hine's work has a coherence and unity that reflects his principled belief in pictures as communication and his unwavering support and sympathy for the young, the poor, the immigrant, and the worker. As Alan Trachtenberg has written, " 'To be straight' for Hine meant more than purity of photographic means; it meant also a responsibility to the truth of his vision."