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  • Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England by Robert Macieski
  • John Edwin Mason
Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England. by Robert Macieski. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. xi + 296 pp. Paper $29.95.

Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England adds depth and texture to the already substantial scholarship about the life and work of photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940). The photographs that Hine made of child laborers during the first decades of the twentieth century powerfully shaped the image of the working class in the American imagination. But his photographs were more than iconic images. Hine's portraits of children employed in mills, mines, factories, and city streets played an essential role in the child labor reform movement that brought many abuses to an end.

In Picturing Class, Robert Macieski joins scholars such as Alan Trachtenberg, Maren Stange, George Dimock, and Kate Sampsell-Willmann in insisting that Hine's photographs cannot be fully appreciated unless they are seen in the light of their original context and purpose. He pays close attention to Hine's intentions, interactions with his subjects, and the uses to which his employers put the photographs. Throughout he is alert to the limitations of Hine's project and of social reform more broadly.

The 1,500 photographs that Hine made of child laborers in New England, over the course of several years, beginning in 1909, are at the heart of Macieski's narrative. The book follows Hine as he journeys throughout the region, photographing and interviewing children in a variety of occupations, from newsies and mill workers to sardine packers and cranberry pickers. Macieski's analysis shows how his ideas about photography and social reform put their stamp on his picture making.

Hine expressed his thinking about photography and reform most clearly in "Social Photography; How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift," a talk that he gave to a gathering of progressive social reformers at about the same time that he was beginning his work in New England. He extolled the ability of "social photography" to arouse "public sympathy." Such sympathy was necessary because he saw middle-class reformers as the "fulcrum of change" (7). Although he and his employer, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), sincerely wanted to end the exploitation of young workers, both understood [End Page 445] reform as something that should be left to middle-class progressives such as themselves and not to an empowered working class. Indeed Macieski shows that reformers were nearly as hostile to working-class culture as they were to child labor itself.

Hine's confidence in the power of photography to sway public opinion rested on what he saw as its ability to bring people "into close touch with reality" (8). His photographs, he believed, were unimpeachable evidence that reform was urgently needed. Paradoxically, he edged close to acknowledging that photographs are representations of the real and not reality itself. "While photographs may not lie," he said in a now famous quote, "liars may photograph" (9). He insisted, however, that conscientious photographers could guard against lies by avoiding "bad habits." He thus sidestepped the more difficult questions that surround representation in photography. Hine may not have lied, but, as Macieski argues, in "framing his images, in selecting his subjects and their surroundings, [he] was constructing social reality" (11).

The nature of that reality is revealed, in part, by the aspects of workers' lives that are missing from it. Because neither Hine nor his employers were interested in encouraging young workers or their parents to fight on their own behalf, Hine's collective portrait of New England's child laborers neglects working-class institutions, such as union halls, and only inadvertently captures "expressions of working-class consciousness" (206). He depicted the children and their communities as "helpless and worthy of social welfare reforms, rather than as active agents of their own lives" (206).

Yet Hine's photographs demonstrate that his subjects sometimes had their own ideas about how they wanted to be represented. Many of the portraits included in Picturing Class show children taking matters into their...

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