Forum: Using Lewis Hine's Child Labor Photographs

Whether it be a painting or photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality. In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.

The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. — Lewis Hine

Title: Young Driver in Mine, 09, 1908 from National Archives Record Group 102: Records of the Children's Bureau, 1908-2003

ARC Idenifier 523089, Local Identifer 102-LH-136

Editor's Note:

Hine's caution against "unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph" echoes the aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain that "figures don't lie, but liars figure." Since historians often use Hine's images both in our teaching and our research, we need to take his views very seriously indeed.

At left is one of his iconic images that nicely illustrates his point that, in many of his pictures, "the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated." Mules were used in both antracite and bituminous mines to pull the coal to the railhead. Hine captured the young driver standing in front of the tracks, arms at his sides, miner's hat with its lamp on his head, whip around his neck. There is no mule to be seen. In fact, the depth of field is such that only the boy is in focus. He looks straight ahead, expressionless. His blackened face and neck contrast with the pale of his upper chest. We see what the photographer intended for us to see.

Kate Sampsell-Willmann, author of "Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, and Pragmatism: Photographs as Lived Experience," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," Vol. 7, No 2 (April 2008) and Lewis Hine As Social Critic (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), leads an open discussion on how to interpret Hine's photographs of child laborers taken between 1908 and 1912 for the National Child Labor Committee.

We invite you to weigh in with suggestions about using these photographs — and others — both in teaching and in research. Simply click on Forums. on General Discussions, and then on "Using Lewis Hine's Child Labor Photographs." In order to comment, you wil have to register.

-- John F. McClymer