Priceless Children: American Photographs 1890-1925 : Child Labor and the Pictorialist Ideal

by George Dimock, Tom Beck, Verna Posever Curtis

Priceless Children includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the century. Lewis Hine's pioneering documentation of immigration and child labor are compared and contrasted with the Pictorialist work by six of his F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Clarence White. Hine's working-class children, portrayed for reform-minded audiences as victims of harshly inhumane conditions, often display a freedom, exuberance, sociability, and autonomy that their more privileged and closely guarded peers might well have envied. Conversely, the bourgeois interior, in the iconography of fine-art photography, did not always or unambiguously register as a safe haven in a heartless world. This book suggests that establishing the value of the "priceless child," part of whose history can be seen in photographs, is an always-unfinished project.

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2002