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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
HINE LEWIS
Chapter 13
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1908
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Lewis Hine
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Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill
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Moments of
Childhood
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The work of the
American photographer Lewis Hine unites moral perspective and social
engagement to a media-conscious application of photography. Especially in
his cycle on child labor in the USA, he rose beyond pictorial journalism
to create an early model for a humane photojournalism.
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He is said to have been always
extremely exact with the inscriptions on his photographs. For he realized:
only when all coordinates passed muster - place, time, situation, etc. -
would his photographs be believed, and only then could he defy the
skeptics and doubters, of which American politics and economy seemed to
provide so many. To undertake all that was necessary so that his work
might produce results - this was the so-to-speak motive force behind his
at times mortally dangerous, and in any case physically and intellectually
grueling, activity. "There were two things I wanted to do," the artist
once explained; "I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I
wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." In these terms,
Lewis Wickes Hine numbers among the leading fieures of socially oriented
documentary photography.
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill
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His vision is always fine and
often superb
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Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton
Mill, 1908, is the simple authorized title of the original 4 1/2 x 6
1/2-inch photograph. Specific mention of the name of the factory or the
date and hour of the photograph are absent. Hine's concern here is with
the condition in general: the presentation of child labor in factories,
coal mines, saw mills, southern cotton fields, and northern urban streets
and squares. What is most important for him is that the situation appear
believable, that the photograph be accepted as evidence, as a document of
record - a term that, moreover, first arose in the middle of the 1920s in
John Cierson's review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana in the New York Sun
of 8 February 1926, in which a similar impulse is termed a 'documentary'.
Hine himself never used the expression. "A good photograph," as he once
defined it, "is not a mere reproduction of an object or a group of
objects, - it is an interpretation of Nature, a reproduction of
impressions made upon the photographer which he desires to repeat to
others."
With this statement, Hine gives a
hint that he was to some extent willing to set up a scene. In the end, he
was not simply seeking the naked pictorial evidence, but rather an effect
in the sense of a clear, but moving, emphasis. Even in his very first
series of photographs of immigrants on Ellis Island he had focused on
individuals or couples from the mass of people, arranged them before a
neutral background, and - one suspects - asked them to hold still a moment
until the heavy Craflex camera was ready for the take and the flash powder
was in the pan. Beyond a doubt, the complexity of the equipment itself
required a certain level of the photographer's attention. In addition,
however, Hine was always concerned also with composition, a fact that is
of ten forgotten in the face of the simplicity of his pictures.
"Certainly, Hine was conscious also of the aesthetics of photography,"
writes Walter Rosenblum, one of the top experts on Hine's work. "His files
contain beautiful prints as well as mediocre ones. But when he organized a
photograph, the effect was right. Considering the range of subject matter,
the difficulties of site and execution, his vision is always fine and of
ten superb."
A girl standing in front of a
spinning machine. We can only guess at her age, for Hine did not reveal
it, even though he often conducted short interviews with the subjects of
his photographs, inquired about their circumstances, and asked their age.
Sometimes he measured the size of the children he photographed against the
buttons on his vest in order at least to estimate their ages later. This
child, whom we could well imagine at a school desk, is probably between
eight and ten years old. Technically, she is not alone in the photograph,
but the grown woman in the background plays no role in the scene, even if
she seems to be attentively watching the process of taking the photograph.
The child herself is unselfconsciously working at the so-called ring
spinning machine, a device invented in the USA at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The fact that at the moment of the photograph the
child has paused in her work deprives the picture of none of its
authority. She is hardly looking happily into the camera, nor does the
state of her apron indicate any especially blessed living conditions. In
1907, that is, shortly before Hine made his photograph, a government
inquiry reported that there were no fewer than 1,750,178 children between
the ages often and fifteen years working in American factories, mines,
farms, or what we would today designate as service industries (such as
shoe-shine, newspaper and errand boys). Moreover, sixty-hour weeks were no
rarity, in spite of child labor being forbidden by law in many of the
states. In Pennsylvania, for example, children under the age of fourteen
could not work in the mines, and in other fields, a minimum age of nine
years had been set. Such regulations, however, were constantly being
evaded, on the one hand because the booming economy required much labor,
and on the other because the sheer poverty widespread among urban and city
dwellers caused many families to rely on even their youngest members for
financial help. For these reasons, proof-of-age certificates were forged,
or false information was pro-vided by the parents. Hordes of underage
children drudged away as 'breaker boys' in mines where accidents were a
common occurrence, and where darkness, cold, wet, and bad air leading to
life-long health problems were a certainty; these Hine also addressed in
his pictures. "Whatever industry saves by child labor," Hine recognized
very early, "society pays over and over."
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Lewis W.
Hine
(1874-1940)
Spinner in New England Mill, 1873
From the series "Child Labor"
(Textiles)
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The worst form of institutions
exploiting children
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Some of the very worse conditions
seem to have existed in the cotton mills of the American South - in North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia - where official statistics record
that almost fifty percent of all workers were approximately ten years old.
The cotton mills are "the worst form of institutions exploiting children"
according to the newspaper Solidarity, the "Official Organ of the Worker,
Health, and Death Insurance of the United States of America," in 1907. The
paper cited also the large rate of illiteracy among the children: 18.8 per
cent of all working children between the ages of ten and fourteen were
designated as illiterate, that is, they could neither read nor write. "How
many of these innocent children, created as human beings in order to
populate this planet, cannot attend school because they lack shoes, and
above all, enough to eat! Because the mothers must go to work in place of
the thousands of fathers who have been killed in the factories, and cannot
look to their children's nourishment!"
The problem of child poverty and
child labor was known, statistically proven, and the object of public
debate. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) under the
direction of Owen R. Lovejoy had formed a private organization with waving
banners against the "greatest crime of modern society," the enslavement
and exploitation of minors. A jointly issued journal bearing the title The
Survey was founded to create the necessary publicity, but seems in fact to
have drawn little attention to itself before Hine appeared. It was only
with the help of his photographic testimony that the opposition to the
often-excoriated evil gained the momentum necessary for reforms, new laws,
and stricter oversight, and finally the abolition of child labor.
"Although we cannot attribute a specific reform to a certain photographic
image, the mass of Hine's powerful photographs could not have failed to
make an impact." {Stephen Victor) Commissioned by the NCLC, Hine produced
more than five thousand photographs between 1906 and 1918. He took his
pictures in the factories of Cincinnati and Indianapolis, visited the
glass works and mines of West Virginia and the textile mills of North
Carolina. He visited home-workers in New York, and observed the night
newspaper-sellers in New England. And this was not his first and largest
photographic inquiry. As early as 1904 Hine had documented the arrival of
European immigrants on Ellis Island. We can assume that Lewis Wickes Hine,
born into modest circumstances in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1874, and orphaned
at an early age, had refined his self-taught photographic knowledge while
attending the New York Ethical Culture School - that is, he learned the
use of the Graf lex and Fachkamera for 31/2 x 43/4-inch and 5 1/8 x 7-inch
glass negatives, the handling of the rather dangerous flash powder, and in
particular the dialogue with those whom he intended to portray in the
midst of the fateful circumstances of their lives. In this effort, his
humor, wit, human understanding, and love of mankind undoubtedly aided him
- together with his often-noted dramatic talent that is supposed to have
gained the versatile Hine entry into factories whose doors were officially
closed to outsiders. There are stories that he regularly assumed the role
of a Bible salesman, an insurance agent, or an industrial photographer to
ease his way around the occasionally militant factory guards. After all,
"to most employers, the exploitation of children was so profitable that
nothing could be permitted to end it." (Walter Rosenblum) Hine's
photographs appeared in the publications of Hine NCLC, in particular in
The Survey. They became the motif for posters and appeared in exhibitions
and slide-lectures with whose help Hine and the NCLC attempted to reach a
broader public. Hine's photographs, in other words, were part of an
advanced concept in a double sense: they looked to modern media to
effectively raise the desire for social reform.
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
Spinner in New England Mill, 1873
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
Spinner in New England Mill, 1873
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Photography as a contemporary
visual means of communication
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More recent photographic criticism
customarily poses Hine as the anti-thesis of Alfred Stieglitz - an
opposition that is only partially justified. Stieglitz attempted to create
recognition for photography as a modern art form by arguing for elaborate
noble-metal processes and an elegant finish. Exactly these qualities seem
not to have interested Hine, at least not in the sense of an artful
photographic practice. "When he became school photographer in 1905, he
didn't know anything about cameras, lenses, technics," according to his
biographer Elizabeth McCausland. "Even today, at 64, he will say with a
naivete both lovable and sad: 'How is it that you make so much better
prints than I do? Is it because your en larger is better than mine?'"
To attempt to conclude that Hine
was not interested in technical photo-graphic questions would be false,
however. What fascinated him was photography as a contemporary visual
means of communication; what he ignored was the concept of the 'fine art
print' as defended by the photographic community oriented on Stieglitz and
his circle. And precisely here may lie the explanation for the low
estimation that Hine and his work have received up to the present time.
For example, Edward Steichen, chief curator for photography at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, showed no interest in 1947 in Hine's estate
after his death in 1940. And even the evaluation of Susan Sontag, who held
Walker Evans to be the most important photographic artist to have
concerned himself with Am-erica, reveals something of the skepticism that
art criticism has shown toward Hine's ceuvre primarily directed to social
criticism. And yet Hine was in fact interested in formal and aesthetic
questions and had, more-over, developed a visual vocabulary that could
hold its own at the height of art-photography debates, being wholly based
on the qualities intrinsic to the medium. In particular his early workers'
portraits, according to Miles Orvell "endow their commonplace subjects
with a dignity not in terms of an art-historical tradition, but in terms
of a new vocabulary of representation that erased the existing
ethnographic and documentary traditions of portraiture and established a
new procedure for represent¬ing working-class character." But there were
very few who recognized this truth during Hine's lifetime, not even a Roy
Stryker, who roundly rejected Hine's application for work with the FSA
project. Thus Lewis Hine died in 1940, impoverished and forgotten. He who
had devoted himself lifelong to the social welfare of others had finally
become a welfare case himself.
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
New England Mill, 1873
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
New England Mill, 1873
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
New England Mill, 1873
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
New England Mill, 1873
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Lewis W. Hine
(1874-1940)
New England Mill, 1873
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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).
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Climbing into America, Ellis Island
New York, 1905
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Group of Italians at Ellis Island
New York, ca 1905
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Young Russian Jewess, Ellis
Island
New York, 1905
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Handicapped - Crippled Steelworker
Pittsburgh,
1908
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Playground in Mill Village
1909
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Street Child
ca 1910
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Three Girls on Street
ca 1910
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Poor Home, New York City Tenement
1910
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Newsie
ca 1912
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Powerhouse Mechanic
1920
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Man on
girders, mooring mast
Empire State Building
New York, ca 1931
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Man on hoisting ball
Empire State Building
New York, 1931 |
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