Artist of the day, November 24: Lewis Hine, American photographer, sociologist.

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Lewis Wickes Hine (1874 – 1940) was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States.

In 1904, Lewis Hine photographed immigrants on Ellis Island, as well as at the tenements and sweatshops where they lived and worked. In 1909 Hine published Child Labor in the Carolinas and Day Laborers Before Their Time, the first of his many photo stories documenting child labor. These photo stories included such pictures as Breaker Boys Inside the Coal Breaker and Little Spinner in Carolina Cotton Mill, which showed children as young as eight years old working long hours in dangerous conditions. Two years later Hine was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to explore child-labor conditions in the United States more extensively. Hine traveled throughout the eastern half of the United States, gathering appalling pictures of exploited children and the slums in which they lived. He kept a careful record of his conversations with the children by secretly taking notes inside his coat pocket and photographing birth entries in family Bibles. He measured the children’s heights by the buttons on his vest.

Mr Lewis Hine

Child labor in mills

Young doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills, Fayetteville, Tennessee

The spinners

Sweeper and doffer in cotton mill

Spinners and doffers in Lancaster Cotton Mills. (dozens of them in this mill) 1908

Spinner, Globe Cotton Mill, Augusta, Georgia,  1909

Spinner in New England mill

Soulmaker

Our strength is our people

Little Fannie, 7 years old, 48 inches high,  helps sister in Elk Mills.

With mother and sister

Doffer in Lincolnton

Child labors, 1913-38

Child labor, doffer boy

Boy from Loray Mill

An anaemic little spinner in a New England cotton mill

Adolescent girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908

 little spinner in the Mollahan Mills,  Newberry,  S.C.

Child labor in mines

Child labor

Midnight at the glassworks

Italian immigrant East Side New York City, 1910

Child labors, 1913-39

Child labor, lil shuckers, 1912

Child labor, a heavy load, 1909

Buster and Eldridge, 1912

7 year old Ferris. Tiny newsie who did not know enough to make change for investigator.
Mobile, Alabama, 1914

Child labor in the fields

Young pickers on Swifts Bog. All working. Falmouth Mass.  1911

Tobacco farmer family, 1916

12 years old, Carrie Maderyos ,ready to pick. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1911

11 year old Callie Campbell picking cotton, 1916.

The children

Iron workers (No children)

Empire State Building