The Recording Angel of Labor

By ROBERT HUGHES

The recording angel of the American proletariat in the early 20th century was all but forgotten when he died in penury in 1940. He was a mild, slender, clerkish-looking and almost incredibly tenacious man named Lewis Hine. Lugging his clumsy 5-by-7 camera into the factories and mines and sweatshops of America, from the immigrant queues of Ellis Island to the cotton mills of North Carolina, Hine did for the laboring poor of his country what Henry Mayhew had done for London workers in the earlier years of Queen Victoria's reign. He identified a class and made it visible. Before him, Jacob Riis had taken a camera into the slums of New York City, but Hine's range and output were larger in scope than Riis'. He was the first American to produce, with a camera, a fully sustained body of images that made people look back beyond the product to the men, women and children who had made it. His photographs altered the meaning of the verb to work as profoundly as Mathew Brady's had changed that of the verb to fight. On March 12 a retrospective of 220 photographs entitled "America & Lewis Hine," organized by Naomi and Walter Rosenblum, opened at the Brooklyn Museum. It is an exemplary show, and a major event for those who believe that photography, to fulfill itself, must embrace its own documentary nature.

Social Change. Hine, of course, believed more than that. To him the camera was an instrument of social change: it could shift the world's inequality a little. "I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected," Hine modestly remarked. "I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." This ambition arose quite early. Born in 1874 in Oshkosh, Wis., the son of a coffee vendor, Hine grew up working. "After grammar school in Wisconsin's 'Sawdust City,' " he recalled, "my education was transferred to the manual side of factory, store and bank. Here I lived behind the scenes in the life of the worker." But in 1901 he moved to New York and taught photography--the rudiments of the craft--to students at a progressive academy called the Ethical Culture School, and there the first of Hine's great subjects appeared to him: Ellis Island. Over a period of five years, 1904 to '09, Hine would take the ferry out to the cavernous halls through which dispossessed Europe was being strained into America and diligently record the epic of hope, bewilderment and fear that passed before him in the crowded immigration pens.

Technically, it was a demanding project. Amid the confusion, Hine accosted his subjects, lined them up, got them to look at the camera (an instrument not familiar in Italian villages or Russian hamlets in 1904) and ignited the magnesium flare. "It took all the resources of a hypnotist, a supersalesman and a ball pitcher," he said, "to prepare them to play the game and then to outguess them so most were not either wincing or shutting their eyes when the time came to shoot." The results rank among the greatest camera portraits ever taken, calmly relentless in their inspection of face and pose, profoundly sympathetic, and wholly unlike the genteel aestheticism of Alfred Stieglitz and the photosecessionists. They were, to use one of Hine's favorite adjectives, "straight."

That such factual and technically pure photography would be taken as "high art" 70 years ago was not to be expected. Hine did not care. As Alan Trachtenberg points out in his excellent catalogue essay, "Ellis Island represented the opening American act of one of the most remarkable dramas in all of history: the conversion of agricultural laborers, rural homemakers and traditional craftsmen into urban industrial workers." Hine, unlike other American photographers, perceived this and made it the lifelong theme of his work. The subject chose him. It presented Hine with a sense of historical duty, as witness to a unique moment in human transactions, that propelled his work for the next three decades. It transcended formalism without damaging his aesthetic sense. Any event is an infinitely divisible string of moments, and Hine had an uncanny eye for the right one. An Italian woman, carrying a floppy bundle of sweatshop piecework on her head through the Lower East Side, is transformed into an icon of labor -- solid as a young Mother Courage, but turned into a caryatid by the iron lamp post that rises above her head, exactly on the axis of her body.

But of sentimentality there is none. Hine's subjects are not "noble workers," abstractions of a class seen from above. They are people living their lives, claiming the viewer's attention only by their irreducible concreteness. This was especially true of Mine's great polemical record-photographs -- the work he did for the National Child Labor Committee after 1908. In the course of it, Hine traversed America, disguising himself and employing all sorts of subterfuges (his friends remembered him as a consummate role player) to get his camera into the factories, mills and mines where children worked. "I have seen their tragic stories, watched their cramped lives, and seen their fruitless struggles in the industrial game, where the odds are all against them," he wrote later. The veracity with which his lens recorded the pinched, pale, grimy faces of breaker boys in a Pennsylvania coal mine, or the raw-fingered, oyster-shucking children of New England, or the wan cotton-mill girls against their enveloping perspectives of white bobbins, has not been equaled since.

Daring Calligraphy. Mine's work was not all indictment. It had its celebratory side as well, and this came to the fore in the 1920s. It took the form of a series of dramatically affirmative "work portraits," designed, as Hine un abashedly put it, for "social uplift," such as Powerhouse Mechanic, 1925. He hit the peak of this imagery in 1930, when he began to document that marvel of audacity and skill, the construction of the Empire State Building. As Trachtenberg remarks, Hine's Empire State series, with its daring calligraphy of girders and Icarian figures treading on air, "participates in the making of the tower by serving as its faithful reflection -- its self-consciousness, one might say. It is as if the making of the tower, an epitome of the constructive potential of labor, photographs itself." The Empire State is no longer the world's tallest building; much of its meaning has therefore been lost. But Hine's photos preserve that meaning, and every rigger perched on the dizzy I beams remains, in the black and white, a kind of all-American Prometheus.

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