Archives : Our Strength Is Our People : The Humanist Photographs of Lewis Hine

Archives – July 27, 2021

On view until August 2 on the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North Carolina, is Our Strength Is Our People: The Humanist Photographs of Lewis Hine. The present includes 65 classic prints from the personal assortment of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg. This transferring and memorable exhibition is a concise survey of the life’s work of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), the daddy of American documentary images. Trained as a sociologist on the University of Chicago, NYU, and Columbia University, Hine grew to become a highschool trainer at New York’s Ethical Culture School, a bastion of progressive training. At the time, the roiling political challenge was immigration – a lot as it’s as we speak. Conservatives considered immigration as a supply of crime, illness, and the lack of America’s important Anglo-Saxon character, whereas Progressives noticed America as a melting pot, a beacon of sunshine for foreigners escaping poverty and tyranny. Armed with a careless large-format view digicam and magnesium flash, Hine took his college students to Ellis Island in 1905 and put a human face on the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Hine’s empathetic curiosity within the immigrant expertise didn’t finish at Ellis Island. In 1907 he joined the Pittsburgh Survey, a complete socioeconomic evaluation of a typical industrial metropolis in America’s heartland. As seen by way of Hine’s lens, the metal that equipped the spine of America’s trade was being cast by immigrants – the Italian and the Irish, the Serb and the Slovak, now proud Americans. Hine’s deal with the dignity of the American employee would final 1 / 4 century, culminating in his magnificent pictures of the development of the Empire State Building in 1931 and within the basic guide Men at Work. His oeuvre is the humanist counterpoint to the avant garde artwork world’s fixation on the machine as the logo of the trendy age.

To Hine, nevertheless, labor was a double-edged sword. In the service of unchecked laissez-faire capitalism, it may very well be bodily and emotionally debilitating, dehumanizing relatively than empowering – by no means extra so than when minor youngsters are disadvantaged of their childhoods and put to work within the factories and the sphere. Starting in 1908, Hine labored for the National Child Labor Committee, sneaking his digicam into cotton mills, canning corporations, and glassworks to doc the exploitation of youngsters, at all times underneath false pretenses and sometimes at nice private danger. Hine’s heart-rending pictures of underage labor have been the principal device utilized by the NCLC to foyer state-by-state for youngster labor legal guidelines, till Congress lastly outlawed the apply on the nationwide degree in 1938.

That 12 months, Hine utilized for a Guggenheim fellowship. His proposed undertaking was entitled “Our Strength is Our People,” from which the exhibition title is borrowed. His proposal acknowledged:

“This project should give us light on the kinds of strength we have to build upon as a nation. Much emphasis is being put upon the dangers inherent in our alien groups, our unassimilated or even partly Americanized citizens – criticism based upon insufficient knowledge. A corrective for this would be better facilities for seeing, and so understanding, what the facts are.”

Inexplicably, the Guggenheim Foundation turned him down.

Two years later, Hine, the epitome of the “concerned photographer,” died penniless and on welfare, his beloved spouse Sara useless of pneumonia, his home misplaced to foreclosures. But as we speak, 80 years after his dying, Hine’s photographic achievement lives on, an unblinking composite portrait of America the melting pot, a rustic beset by grave injustices, but at all times a beacon of hope. 

Our Strength Is Our People: The humanist pictures of Lewis Hine is on view until August 2 on the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. It is being traveled by art2art Circulating Exhibitions, www.art2art.org