Staging Childhood: Lewis Hine's Photographs of Child Labor

If pictures are corrosives, it is because light itself is an acid: it burns into me; it remakes me in its own image.

James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing

We see in the Theatre (therefore one sees oneself), thanks to acting, all the figures of our blindness, incarnate, visible in such a way in which we do not see them in reality . . .

Helene Cixous, "Enter the Theatre (in between)"

Lewis Hine, whose influential photographs of child workers were taken between 1908 and 1921, is most commonly hailed as a major activist of the Progressive era, a social reformer employed by the National Child Labor Commission who documented children working in factories, mills, mines, canneries, farms and on the streets of urban America. This documentation, more than 5,000 photographs dating from his first diptychs and triptychs to the more interpretive and lyrical photo montages of "Time Exposures" in 1914-15, secured Hine's role as the "Crusader with a Camera." ¹ Years later, Owen Lovejoy, Hine's boss and General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, wrote: "The work that you did under my direction was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts or conditions of child labor employment to public attention" (qtd. in Bannon 23).

As Hine's reputation as a reformer grew, so did his status as a pioneer of documentary style, and Hine's admirers embraced and emulated both his courage and artistic vision. Documentary photography, Dona Schwartz observes, shares a common history with photojournalism, and is "distinctive for its dual rhetoric, which simultaneously asserts the objectivity of news photographs while praising the skill and artistry of its best photographers" (160). Hine's contributions to social documentary continued into the years of the Farm Service Administration, and were highly influential for such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and other Life magazine photographers. Also, his status as an artist was assured by the critical attention paid him by Beaumont Newhall, then curator at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by a celebratory retrospective of his work featured at the Riverside Museum in 1939. In recognition of Hine's lifetime of work, Newhall wrote: "These photographs were taken primarily as records. . . . The presence in them of an emotional quality raises them to works of art" (qtd. in Kaplan, Photo Story xxii). Thus Hine's photographs are jointly praised for their polemical value as objective representations documenting the truth of a specific historical circumstance in the external world (in this case, a severely under-reported 1,752,187 child workers in American industry in 1900), and also for Hine's artistic point of view. In keeping with Newhall's commentary, the presence of the author in documentary work is signaled by what Alison Solomon-Godeau identifies as the "desire to build pathos or sympathy into the image, to invest the subject with either an emblematic or an archetypal importance, to visually dignify labor or poverty . . . [thereafter] enshrined as a humanist monument to the timeless struggle against adversity, or revered as a record of individual photographic achievement" (179).

This paradox has (in part) engendered another perspective on documentary photography exemplified by the work of critics John Tagg and Allan Sekula. What Tagg terms "the currency of photographs," and what Sekula calls the "traffic in photographs," are terms that question both the presence of social fact in documentary photography and the presumed humanitarian outcomes of such work. For these theorists, Geoffrey Batchen summarizes, "The identity of a photograph is thereby equated not with some kind of inherent photographic qualities but with what that photograph actually does in the world. The crucial point is that photographs can never exist outside discourses or functions of one kind or another. There is never a neutral ground where the photograph is able to speak 'of and for itself,' where it can emit some essential, underlying 'true' meaning" (4). Photography is then not a consequence of nature (a picture of the world...