Hine Lewis
Biography
September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940
1. Born September 26, 1874 in Oshkosh, WI
2. He attended university extension courses at the State Normal School in Oshkosh. By 1905, he had received his master’s degree in pedagogy from New York University.
3. Arthur Kellogg, who worked for the magazine Charities and the Commons. This introduction opened doors to more relationships and eventually Lewis Hine became a freelance photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Hine experienced first hand the exploitation of young workers and he was determined to escape this type of life.
4. His first job was in a furniture upholstery factory; he worked 13 hours a day, 6 days a week and earned $4 per week. Other jobs followed, such as a janitor in a bank, Hine said, where after several years I worked up as far as supervising sweeper.
5. As photographer, Hine’s primary job was to document the social and academic aspects of the school. Hine soon realized the power that photography had to reveal truth and reality, which made an ever-lasting impact on him. He envisioned photography’s potential as an educational tool.
I would describe Hine as a very educational Photographer. he wanted to inform the public of the poor working conditions for children.Hine made the first of many visits to Ellis Island to document this movement. This same year, he had developed a love and respect for the photography that he offered a new course of photography at the school. Seeing children working under extreme conditions in mills, factories, mines, fields and canneries influenced Hine the most. He took it upon himself to expose this to the public. You can see this in his work because a lot of his photos have the same theme of distressed children.
Hine Majorly contributed to documenting the great depression and also exposing the working conditions in America. another thing he did was doccument the building of the empire state. This task added another dangerous aspect to Hine’s career; he would hang from cherry-pickers, balancing 100 stories high to achieve certain aerial views. He would swing out beyond the building to photograph and gather information of workers within the structure. Selected images from the culmination of these projects eventually became Men at Work, an excellent, pioneering picture book.
During WWI, the American Red Cross hired Hine to photograph the relief mission to France and the Balkans. After the war he did work for the American Clothing Workers, the National Tuberculosis Commission, the Tenement House Commission, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Milbank Foundation, the Harkness Foundation and the Interchurch World Movement. Hine published a series of photo essays and played a major role in The Pittsburgh Survey, a survey of social and living conditions inequality of that industrialized city. From these various assignments came forth a portfolio. In April 1924, Hine received the Art Directors Club of New York Medal for photography. More published articles followed: including He Who Interprets Big Labor in the Mentor. In the 1930s, Hine worked for agencies such as The New Deal Agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the National Research Project and many more.
The early 1930s marked our country’s greatest depression, and Hine so desperately wanted to take part with Roy Stryker, who led the FSA project of documenting the people of the depression, but was repeatedly denied.
