Lewis Hine by Timothy J. Duerden

Author:Timothy J. Duerden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2018-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

“George Cox, 13-year-old colored boy, has just joined the 4H club and is raising a pig. West Virginia, October 10, 1921” (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, reproduction number, LC-DIG-nclc-04438).

Yet change was not solely limited to subject matter for Lewis Hine during the first years of the 1920s. Interestingly, he also changed the equipment he liked to use around the same time and the way in which he advertised his work to the general public. As the keeper of Hine’s largest collection of images, the George Eastman House Museum, has noted, “Hine did his work initially with a 5 × 7 view camera with rapid rectilinear lens, using a magnesium flash at night or indoors. He worked with 5 × 7 and 4 × 5 glass plates, later using 4 × 5 film. About 1920 he began using a 4 × 5 Graflex, adapted for either a five or eight inch lens.”34 And in 1921 Hine began using the phrase “Lewis Wickes Hine, Interpretive Photography” in his studio publicity, dropping his earlier “Social Photography by Lewis W. Hine.” The change was evidently in order to emphasize a more artistic approach to his work.35

Hine in fact had always considered himself just as much an artist as a social documentarian—ever since first picking up a camera as an assistant teacher at the Ethical Culture School back in 1903. (He had actually wished to become an artist of some sort during his childhood in Oshkosh and remained an avid wood-carver throughout his adult life.) Before World War I, however, American photographic tastes had very much been molded by Alfred Stieglitz and those “Pictorialists” who gravitated around the Photo-Secession movement. As noted in a previous chapter, Pictorialists tended to favor misty and highly manipulated images, deliberately choosing to shun the “straight” realism of photographers like Lewis Hine. Yet, with the influence of Pictorialism very much on the wane by 1920, those realists such as Hine were beginning to receive their just due as artists.36 Indeed, having already won innumerable plaudits for his “sociological” and documentary work, in the fall of 1920 Hine received what was in a sense his first public recognition as an artist with the opening of his first one-man show: Interpretation of Social and Industrial Conditions Here and Abroad. As mentioned in an earlier section of this chapter, the exhibit of his works at the National Arts Club at Gramercy Park in New York City featured photographs taken by Hine beginning in his Ellis Island years and continuing through his days with the NCLC right up through his one-year stint in Europe with the Red Cross. The show was a milestone for the Arts Club, too, in that Hine became the first solo photographer to be exhibited there.37 Afterwards, the exhibit, now titled Life and Labor, moved on to a larger venue, a gallery at New York’s Civic Club on West 12th Street and subsequently on to his adopted hometown of Hastings-on-Hudson.

By 1920, with the

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