Lewis hine photos
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Teaching With Documents: Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor
Background
"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."
-- Lewis Hine,
After the Civil War, the availability of natural resources, new inventions, and a receptive market combined to fuel an industrial boom. The demand for labor grew, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many children were drawn into the labor force. Factory wages were so low that children often had to work to help support their families. The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial jobs for wages climbed from million in to 2 million in Businesses liked to hire children because they worked in unskilled jobs for lower wages than adults, and their small hands made them more adept at handling small parts and tools. Children were seen as part of the family
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Joys and Sorrows: Lewis Hine at Ellis Island
All photos artighet of the New York Public Library
Lewis Hine was a social photographer, whose work literally changed the world. His most famous work captured, with great risk to his own safety, the invisible child laborers who worked difficult and dangerous jobs at the vända of the century. The newness of the photography medium combined with Hine&#;s beautiful and haunting portraits of working children led to fundamental changes in child labor laws in the United States.
But a few years before he began his work for the National Child Labor Committee, he worked at the Ethical Culture School in New York City as a teacher and school photographer. His first assignment was to photograph contemporary immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Some of these photos are available to view in the New York Public Library&#;s digital collections. Many of these photos were taken between to , but Hine also returned to Ellis Island in to take pictures
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Biography
Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Lewis W. Hine studied sociology before moving to New York in to work at the Ethical Culture School, where he took up photography to enhance his teaching practices. By he had begun a series of photographs documenting the arrival of immigrants at Ellis Island; this project, along with his pictures of harsh labor conditions published in the Pittsburgh Survey, brought his work to the attention of the National Child Labor Committee. He served as its official photographer from to , and later traveled with the Red Cross to Europe, where he documented the effects of World War I in France and the Balkans for Red Cross Magazine. After returning to the United States in , he accepted commercial assignments, produced another series on Ellis Island immigrants, and photographed the construction of the Empire State Building. Several of these construction pictures were published in Men at Work (), a book celebrating the individual worker's interaction with