Lewis Hine

(b Oshkosh, WI, 26 Sept 1874; d Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 4 Nov 1940).

 American photographer. Following several years as a factory worker in Oshkosh, and a short period at the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology and pedagogy (1900–01), he went to New York to teach at the Ethical Culture School (1901–8). There he acquired a camera as a teaching tool and soon set up a club and ran classes at the school, while improving his own skills as a self-taught photographer. In 1904 Hine’s interest in social issues led him to document newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island as a way of demonstrating their common humanity, for example Young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island (1905). Thereafter he sought to demonstrate the efficacy of the photograph as a truthful witness, accepting commissions from social-work agencies. Towards the end of the first decade he became official photographer on the Pittsburgh Survey, a seminal investigation of America’s archetypal industrial city, producing such images as Tenement House and Yard (1907–8; Rosenblum, Rosenblum and Trachtenberg, p. 56).

Hine Levis



 

1905
    


 

1909
    

   

1910
      

  

1910
     

    

1920
      

  

1931

1931