Lewis Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor
Nikki S. Lee
Photography, like cinema, has long had two polar tendencies: documentation and abstraction. Though such categories inevitably oversimplify, the documentary photographer–represented in several current exhibits–seems to subordinate his vision to his subject matter.
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Children as young as five are shown performing agricultural or factory labor or doing piecework at home. In an untitled image from about 1912, four young cotton pickers carry heavy sacks; children are consistently seen dwarfed by their loads or by a mound of oyster shells or by the machines around them. The composition of Greek Bootblacks, N.Y. (1906)–the boys have their backs to us as they attend three well-dressed, self-satisfied gentlemen–obliterates the bootblacks’ identities. The girl in Little Spinner in Cotton Mill, Augusta, Ga. Overseer Said She Was Regularly Employed (1909) is flanked by two long rows of machinery.
And when the subjects don’t look at the camera, they often inhabit a private zone the camera can’t enter. Newsies and Bootblacks Shooting Crap (1910) shows children hunched around a small area of the sidewalk with looks of intense concentration, but we can see little of the game. The child in Newsgirl, Park Row (1910) has stopped to read one of her papers, suggesting that not all child laborers were illiterate. A gathering of five around a modest table in Family Homework (1908), including three young children, concentrate on their tasks: making artificial flowers. Their attention to this painstaking work seems to divide them, but the tight composition expresses a family unity we can’t fully understand.
Lee is likely reflecting on her immigrant status and the idea of experimenting with identity. The problem is that her work never goes beyond the snapshot level–nor is it composed interestingly enough to comment on the snapshot tradition. The first in a line of idle skateboarders, unconvincingly tilting her board the way the boys do, she seems to say only “look at me.” Posing as a tourist in front of the Statue of Liberty, she raises her arm in imitation of the statue–whose arm her composition cuts off, blunting an already tired comparison.
