Circa 1906. Image via ICP
1910: A young boy in ragged clothes and bandages waits alone in front of the doctor’s office. 1906: A group of boys huddle together at midnight near the Brooklyn Bridge, selling newspapers to make any small living they can.
Lewis Hine’s photographs of poor and working children are among his most famous and acknowledged. His work embodied the life of thousands of ordinary Americans in the first half of the 20th century, and captured some of the most iconic images in American history. He is considered a pioneer of social documentary photography.
Circa 1910. Image via ICP
In two excellent new exhibits, the International Center of Photography examines Hine’s photographic career through both his famous and lesser-known works. Lewis Hine and The Future of America, running now through January 19, offer an inspiring and haunting glimpse at our country’s working-class past.
Beginning with his earliest photographs at Ellis Island in 1905, Lewis Hine follows with a selection of every major project of Hine’s career. This includes 1910’s “Hull House,” Post-World War I’s “American Red Cross in Europe” series, and 1932’s “Men at Work,” detailing the construction of the Empire State Building.
The second exhibit, The Future of America, documents Hine’s work as chief photographer for the National Research Project (NRP), a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s. The least known of all Hine’s photographs, these captured working conditions in northeast industrial towns. The U.S. government used these photographs to help study industrial technologies and their effects on employment, effectively documenting the historic labor and industry transitions of the time period.
The two exhibits combined present over 200 photographs on loan from the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.
Hine was trained as a sociologist, giving his photography a very keen insight into its subject matter. He is often compared to photographer Jacob Riis, the photojournalist who advocated for New York City’s working poor population.
Circa 1931. Image via ICP.
Hine’s wider range of subjects, however, gives viewers a much more complex and intricate view of life in the early 20th century. The expansive material on view at the ICP is a perfect introduction to his work- spanning 30 years and several geographical eras. The images themselves are voyeuristic angles, yet objective in their frames. All of them are mesmerizing.
Hine was meticulous in the quality of his subjects and images. Looking at row after row of his work on display, you can see the care and precision he took into creating each shot. The people and the places and the scenes, often shot in action, make a long distance era seem not so long ago anymore.
Hine doesn’t need an expansive exhibit to prove his incredible influence on modern photography- but the ICP does his legacy great justice in these two collections.
