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About Lewis Wickes Hine's Work Portraits

Lewis Wickes Hine's self described "work portraits" series began shortly after World War I when he returned from Europe where he was working with the American Red Cross documenting the plight of war refugees. This time, instead of documenting the decrepit working conditions of men, women and children in American factories, he chose to glorify the inextricable communion between the worker and the machine in a more positive way. Between 1920 and 1940, the year of his death, Hine sought to promote the American worker in this heroic role by showing workers not subjugated by machines, but firmly in control. Calling his new approach Interpretive Photography, Hine regularly published these photographs in the form of picture essays, with little text, in the publications The Survey and The Survey Graphic, both edited by Paul Kellogg.(1)

Given Hine's past as a social welfare reformer and crusader for labor, it is somewhat perplexing that he would now choose to seek conciliation between the worker and management. But with the harsh realities of World War I fresh in his mind and the Machine Age just dawning, Hine perhaps sensed a certain inevitability in the industrialization of society. Hine knew that the machine he knew best, his camera, had the power to educate and communicate, often beyond the capacities of words. In the September 1926 issues ofThe Mentor, Hine expresses this belief:

"As I see it, the great problem of industry is to go a step beyond merely having the employee and employer 'get along'. The employee must be induced to feel pride in his work....I try to do with the camera what the writer does with words. People can be stirred to a realization of the values of life by writing. Unfortunately many persons don't comprehend good writing. On the other hand, a picture makes its appeal to everyone. Put into the picture an idea and, if properly used, it may be transferred to the brain of the worker...Interpretive photography...will do that, I know, for it has been done. The great problem, of course, is to link the employer and employees in this method of education so that each sees the value in it. The employer must think of it as genuine, not paternalistic; the employee must think of it as a sincere treatment of him and his work, not flattery."(2)

Although Hine was generally unsuccessful in getting many industrial assignments promoting his work portraits theme, his attempts at positive social documentary was groundbreaking nevertheless. As Beaumont Newhall put it in 1938,

"Positive documentation is less obvious, more difficult, just as necessary for sociological purposes, and offers much greater range and scope. In this form of documentation also, Hine is a pioneer." (3)

Whether Hine concentrated on exposing or celebrating the realities of labor in America, his photography was filled with humanism. It is this humanism that marks Hine as one of the first great documentarians of American culture of the twentieth century.