A personal reassessment of Lewis Hine's iconic, haunting photos of
child workers in the early twentieth century
Between 1908 and 1917, the American photographer and sociologist Lewis
Hine (1874-1940) took some of the most memorable pictures of child
workers ever made. Traveling around the United States while working for
the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed children in textile
mills, coal mines, and factories from Vermont and Massachusetts to
Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Using his camera as a tool of social
activism, Hine had a major influence on the development of documentary
photography. But many of his pictures transcend their original purpose.
Concentrating on these photographs, Alexander Nemerov reveals the
special eeriness of Hine's beautiful and disturbing work as never
before. Richly illustrated, the book also includes arresting
contemporary photographs by Jason Francisco of the places Hine
documented.
Soulmaker is a striking new meditation on Hine's photographs. It
explores how Hine's children lived in time, even how they might continue
to live for all time. Thinking about what the mill would be like after
he was gone, after the children were gone, Hine intuited what lives and
dies in the second a photograph is made. His photographs seek the
beauty, fragility, and terror of moments on earth.
