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



 

Climbing into America, Ellis Island
New York, 1905

Group of Italians at Ellis Island
New York, ca 1905

Young Russian Jewess, Ellis Island
New York, 1905
 

Handicapped - Crippled Steelworker
 Pittsburgh,
1908

Playground in Mill Village
1909
 

Street Child
ca 1910
 

Three Girls on Street
ca 1910
 

Poor Home, New York City Tenement
1910
 

Newsie
ca 1912

Powerhouse Mechanic
1920
 

Man on girders, mooring mast
Empire State Building
New York, ca 1931

Man on hoisting ball
Empire State Building
New York, 1931