Lewis Hine's "eye" for truth

Before learning what Lewis Hine means to social reform art and to documentary photography, I knew his photographs. I had been seeing them since I was a girl.

I was born and raised in the Appalachian Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, an area Hine visited when he was making photographs for the National Child Labor Committee in the early 1900s. Hine evidently was THE ONE to tell the child labor story as he did because his own modest background lent familiarity to what he saw through the lens.

Interestingly, Hine, like FSA Photographer Walker Evans decades later, said he did not consider himself an “art photographer.” Author James Guimond tells us that in a 1926 interview, Hine had this to say: “Nor is he, in any sense of the word, a commercial photographer. The effect of a picture as a compositional study does not interest him consciously. Its value as a survey of a human phase of industry is what he is after … Into all his work Mr. Hine gets an interpretive angle. Indeed, he terms himself an “interpretive photographer.’ A picture which has beauty without significant means little to him.” Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.(84)

Hine saw the photo caption as a “social pen picture” that reinforced the emotional appeal of a photograph, Guimond tells us.

Yet, “It was not until the 1930s, for instance, that European artists and intellectuals like Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin began to understand that straight photographs, ‘simple reproduction[s] of reality,” might not express anything important about that reality … and therefore it was necessary for photographers to ‘build something up,” to construct “something artistic” about these subjects by using captions and photomontages. Without captions, Brecht said in a 1934 comment that applies very well to [Margaret] Bourke-White’s Fortune portfolios, photography would ‘become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it … What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.” Guimond (95)

For more information, visit:

Documenting The Other Half: The Social Reform Photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.