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Reviewed by:
  • Lewis Hine as Social Critic
  • Cara A. Finnegan
Lewis Hine as Social Critic. By Kate Sampsell-Willmann. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009; pp. xii + 331. $50.00 cloth.

Lewis Wickes Hine is a key figure in the history of social documentary photography in the United States. Best known for the photographs he made for the National Child Labor Committee in the early twentieth century, Hine was also a Chicago School progressive who took courses in rhetoric, studied the pragmatist philosophies of William James [End Page 741] and John Dewey, and directly influenced the rise of social science methods of fieldwork. Studied extensively by photography historians but virtually ignored by scholars of public culture, Hine has not been recognized as the public intellectual that he was. Historian Kate Sampsell-Willmann seeks to remedy this neglect in her study of Hine. In what is the first book-length study of Hine's complete oeuvre, Sampsell-Willmann explores Hine's career as a chronicler of the American worker. Even in the midst of the machine age and in times of depression and labor strife, Hine saw "the worker as primary mover in industrial society" (13). As a result, Sampsell-Willmann argues, his pictures embody deep "concern for the dignity of work as a human value" (13). Although the book's critical efforts are uneven and it is marred by some factual errors, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Hine as a photographer and, indeed, philosopher, of the American worker.

The book is organized chronologically into chapters that take up each period of Hine's nearly 40-year photographic career. Chapter one situates Hine's earliest work at Ellis Island in his experiences as a teacher in the Ethical Culture School in New York City and within pragmatist philosophy more generally. Chapter two takes up Hine's work for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), widely argued to be his most fertile period of production. Chapter three examines the use of Hine's images in a progressive economics textbook, American Economic Life, which also marked the beginning of his messy relationship with Roy Stryker, who later went on to head the Farm Security Administration's documentary photography project. Chapter four examines what is perhaps Hine's least-known work, his photographs for the Red Cross made in Europe in 1918–1919. Chapter five engages Hine's masterful work portraits as presented in his landmark book, Men at Work. Chapter six concludes the study with a discussion of the work Hine produced during the Great Depression for the Red Cross and the Tennessee Valley Authority, among others.

The book's primary contribution is its comprehensiveness. Past scholarship on Hine has tended to confine itself to one of these periods, particularly the child labor images made for the NCLC. In addition, this more focused work tends not to highlight Hine's agency as the maker of photographs. By presenting us with all of Hine (or at least much more of him than we typically see), Sampsell-Willmann allows us to appreciate the intellectual contributions, especially their remarkable consistency over time. Much has been made, for example, of Hine's apparent "shift" in styles from what he coined as "social [End Page 742] photography"—loosely understood as the visual depiction of systemic social problems requiring public solutions—to more "interpretive" work less focused on progressive political goals and even occasionally subsidized by corporations. Sampsell-Willmann nicely complicates that dichotomy by suggesting that even Hine's more interpretive work retained the residue of social photography as it continually highlighted the value of work and the everyday heroism of the American worker. Her discussion of Hine's Men at Work is especially insightful in this regard, and the best chapter in the book.

That said, visual rhetoricians of public culture may find some elements of Sampsell-Willmann's argument disappointing. For example, I was sorry that the author pays so little attention to Hine's so-called "time exposures," anti-child labor photographic montages that Hine produced for child labor exhibits and publications. The time exposures typically were displayed in diptych or triptych form, usually accompanied by texts that worked with the montages...

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