juleswords

Lewis Hine (1874-1940) is best known for the documentary images of child labor practices that he produced under the aegis of the National Child Labor Committee from 1911 to 1916. These photographs not only have been credited as important in the passing of child labor laws, but also have been praised for their sympathetic depiction of individuals in abject working conditions. Hine labeled his pictures "photo-interpretations," emphasizing his subjective involvement with his subjects; this approach became the model for many later documentary photographers, such as Sid Grossman and Ben Shahn. ... In 1911, a man walked into the Maggioni Canning Company in Port Royal, South Carolina, and did something that almost no one thought to do. He asked the children their names. His name was Lewis Hine. He was a sociologist turned photographer working for the National Child Labor Committee. His job was to document what American industry preferred to keep invisible. What he found at the oyster canneries along the Carolina coast was a world built on small hands. Josie was 6 years old. Bertha was 6. Sophie was 10. They stood at the shucking tables before dawn, prying open oyster shells with short knives, fingers raw, the salt air coming off the water in the dark. Bertha had started her shift at 4 a.m. The cannery owners did not see children. They saw throughput. The shells came in by the bushel and the meat had to come out by a certain hour. Small fingers were good at the work. That was the math. Hine wrote down their names in his field notes. He said their ages aloud and recorded them. He photographed them standing straight, looking at the camera, present. This was not accidental. Hine understood that anonymity was how exploitation sustained itself. If a child was only "a worker," she could be replaced, forgotten, defended with abstractions. If her name was Bertha and she was 6 years old and she had been standing at that table since before the sun came up, she was a person. And persons are harder to ignore. The photographs Hine made in these years, across mills and mines and canneries from Maine to Texas, became central evidence in the campaign that eventually produced federal child labor restrictions in the United States. The Keating-Owen Act passed in 1916. It was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later. Real, lasting federal protection did not come until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Josie. Bertha. Sophie. Their surnames were not recorded. Their lives after Port Royal are not known. But they are not anonymous. Hine made sure of that. He once wrote that he had two goals with a camera: to show the things that needed to be corrected, and to show the things that deserved to be appreciated. Sometimes a name written in a notebook is the only monument a person gets. Hine's field notes are held at the Library of Congress. The names are still there, in his handwriting, next to the ages. He wrote them down for exactly this reason. 📷 : the historical 1908 photograph by Lewis Hine captures 11-year-old Otha Porter Martin working as a "tipple boy" at the Turkey Knob Mine in MacDonald, West Virginia. #archaeohistories