Lewis Wickes Hine: the final years

Lewis Wickes Hine died in 1940 in obscurity and abject poverty in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. For forty years he had photographed the American people in the agony of social and economic change. He was more than a muckraker, more than a crusading sociologist. His images celebrated the essential dignity of the human spirit and its incredible ability to survive.

Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 16, 1874, Hine came to New York City in 1901 to teach nature studies and geography at the Ethical Culture School (now the Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York). In 1903 the principal, Frank A. Manny, gave him a camera as an experimental teaching aid. Hine's interest in the camera was immediate and lasting. His first serious documentary photography was a study of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, which he undertook between 1904 and 1909. The result is perhaps the most complete pictorial examination of the great tide of humanity that entered this country at the turn of the century.

Hine continued to teach at the Ethical Culture School until 1908, but by 1906 he was providing photographs to many social welfare organizations in New York and elsewhere and for the magazine Charities and The Commons (renamed the Survey in 1909). In 1907 and 1908 he took part in the magazine's photographic survey of the industrial city of Pittsburgh, and the following year he joined the staff of the magazine.

In 1908 Hine also joined the staff of the National Child Labor Committee, and for the next decade he traveled the country, providing the committee with irrefutable photographic evidence of the tragedy of child labor [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]. As art director of the organization, he enlarged, silhouetted, and juxtaposed photographs to heighten their impact. He also prepared and presented slide lectures illustrating the wretched conditions prevailing for working children. His efforts stimulated remedial legislation, but by 1918 Hine's investigative photographic essays were no longer considered necessary. The National Child Labor Committee reduced his salary, and he ended his association with the organization.

Hine joined the American Red Cross in 1918 to record postwar relief efforts in Europe, returning to New York City in 1919. He then organized exhibitions for the American Red Cross Museum, which was founded in 1919 in Washington, D.C., and in connection with the Red Cross he photographed rural health programs.(1)

During the 1920s Hine began to call himself an interpretive photographer and organized exhibitions of his work, among them Interpretation of Social and Industrial Conditions Here and Abroad, which was shown at the National Arts Club and the Civic Club, both in New York City, in the fall of 1920. He exhibited his work in banks, at the Women's Club in Hastings-on-Hudson, and at the Art Directors and the New York Advertising Clubs, both in New York City. Until he was commissioned to photograph the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930, Hine's only income was from freelance work. Some of the photographs from the Empire State Building project appeared in his book Men at Work, published to considerable acclaim in 1932, and in the magazine the Survey in 1934. A portfolio of photographs of loom workers in textile mills was exhibited at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago and published that year as Through the Loom and in the Survey. In the same year a month-long assignment photographing the Wilson and Muscle Shoals dam sites in northwestern Alabama, part of the Tennessee Valley Authority, ended when they were published without crediting Hine as the photographer.

In 1935 Hine consulted Roy Stryker (1893-1976) of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) about the loss of control of his prints. Stryker advised him to retain his negatives, and at the same time asked for the prints Hine had made for the Rural Electrification Administration in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. Stryker then told Hine he would keep him in mind for a photographic project dear to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president had asked Stryker to send a hand-picked group of photographers into the country's heartland to record the brave struggle of farmers and ranchers who were suffering economically and spiritually from the Great Depression. Hine wanted fervently to take part in this project,(2) and Stryker, while encouraging him, kept putting him off. In fact, Stryker confided to a friend that Hine was past his prime and too demanding.(3)

Hine subsequently changed his photographic style dramatically, perhaps to conform to what he thought might appeal to Stryker. This final group of photographs includes details of workers' hands and constructivist portraits of the machine. The best were made between about 1937 and 1938 in High Point, North Carolina; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Patterson, New Jersey, documenting textile manufacturing, which only required a few workers to operate the machinery. Some of the photographs appear in his textile manufacturing series entitled "Between the Threads," made in 1933 for Shelton Looms in Massachusetts. Hine apparently never bothered to make show prints of more than a very few of the pictures he took after 1930. These later photographs are a poignant reminder that the worker was no longer simply a slave to the machine but had become subsumed by it. The assembly line had triumphed.