Lewis Wickes Hine is best known for his unflinching portraits of children, housing, and labor conditions in the United States, and of immigrants arriving and processing at Ellis Island. Born in 1874, Hine arrived in New York City in 1901 to teach at the Ethical Culture School (now the Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York). His principal gave him a camera as an experimental teaching aid and Hine took immediate interest in the camera and it became a life-long tool of his work. 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 followed these immigrants into the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side in Manhattan. With his camera, he exposed the terrible housing and working conditions facing the immigrants as they struggled with a new culture and in most cases, a new language.

Hine was determined to use his skill at creating the visual evidence of the struggle of workers to support reform campaigns. In 1907, he was invited to participate in the Pittsburgh Survey, which was designed to investigate the living and working conditions of that heavily industrialized city.

At the end of the project he became a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). In this capacity he traveled across much of the southern and eastern states documenting the working conditions of factories, fields, mines, mills and canneries which made use of child labor. He declared he "wanted to show things that had to be corrected." The results of Hine's photographic pursuits eventually led to the establishment of child labor and safety laws for all workers.

Founded in 1904, the National Child Labor Committee set out on a mission of "promoting the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working." Starting in 1908, the Committee hired Hine, first on a temporary and then on a permanent basis, to carry out investigative and photographic work for the organization. The more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives given to the Library by the NCLC in 1954 are part of the Prints and Photographs Division's holdings. The images, together with the often extensive captions that describe the photo subjects, reflect the results of this early documentary effort, offering a detailed depiction of working and living conditions of many children--and adults--in the United States between 1908 and 1924.

NCLC photos are useful for the study of labor, reform movements, children, working class families, education, public health, urban and rural housing conditions, industrial and agricultural sites, and other aspects of urban and rural life in America in the early twentieth century.

Medium : 1 photographic print

Created/Published : ca1924

Creator : Lewis Wickes Hine, Photographer, 1874-1940

Part of the records from the National Child Labor Committee housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Availability: Usually ships in one week

Product #: nclc05276