Photo Story: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine

by Lewis Wickes Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) was a pivotal figure in the history of American photography. Instrumental in developing the social documentary genre, he is probably best known today for his photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island, child laborers, and European war refugees, and for his later celebrations of industrial worker - a series he referred to as Work Portraits. As early as 1914 Hine also coined the term photo story to describe creative assemblages of photographs and text. These were designed to make powerful educational and artistic statements on the printed page - twenty years before the editors of Life magazine "invented" the format.
Photo Story broadens the perspective on Hine by charting his pioneering role as both a social documentary photographer and photojournalist. Daile Kaplan includes material from his earliest years, 1904-12, as he made the transition from teacher to photographer at the Ethical Culture School in New York; through the spring of 1918, as he photographed war refugees and relief programs for the American Red Cross throughout Europe; to 1920-39, as he chronicled the construction of the Empire State Building and completed Work Portraits for corporations and federal agencies. The book features previously unpublished credos, diary entries, and letters exchanged with such important figures of the photographic, art, and social welfare communities as Beaumont Newhall, Walter Rosenblum, Berenice Abbott, Elizabeth McCausland, Roy Stryker, and Paul U. Kellogg. The letters to his longtime collaborator Kellogg, the editor of the Survey Graphic, form the book's centerpiece.
Often witty and lyrical, the letters reveal Hine's early influences in the social welfare community; his views about Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (a group of art photographers, led by Stieglitz, who eschewed social photographs for soft-focus, mood-manipulating images); and his perception of his own photographs as "art." The correspondence sheds light on his decision to become a freelance photographer and pursue the Work Portraits; his attempts to be hired by the Farm Security Administration's photographs division; his debt to Newhall, Abbott, and McCausland for rediscovering him in the late 1930s and mounting the Riverside Museum retrospective; and his financial struggles in the postwar years.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 1992

About the author

Lewis Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium.

In 1907, he became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey.

In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labour Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, he documented child labour, with focus on the use of child labour in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits.

During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he made a series of "work portraits," which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, he was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. To obtain the best vantage points, he was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000ft above Fifth Avenue. At times, he remembered, he hung above the city with nothing below but "a sheer drop of nearly a quarter-mile."

During the Great Depression he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. He was also a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed.

The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage. He hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing repeatedly to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died on November 3, 1940, at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old.