Lewis Hine - My world, my view.

Lewis Hine was an American photographer born in 1874. In 1904, Lewis Hine photographed immigrants on Ellis Island, as well as the sweatshops where they lived and worked. But he is most known for his photographs of child labor and the living conditions they had to endure. His work showed the public the horrifying truths about child labor. By doing this Lewis Hine's work helped change child labor laws in the United States. Hine worked as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).

Hine's work is proof of just how much of an impact photography has on the world, and how you can use photography for social reform. this, to me, is very interesting. I always think about the things that go on behind the scene's or the things we ignore that need to be seen, and is one of the reasons I am vegan. It shows how much of an impact one image can have. For Hine, the art of photography lay in its ability to interpret the everyday world.

Whilst looking through some of Hine's work I came across this photograph of three little girls working on a farm.

The girls in this photo can’t be more than 6 years old, but they do not have the faces of children. Their faces look worked, there clothes are dirty and their shoes are old and worn. The girl on the right looks particularly alarming to me, her brows are frowning and her eyes look so much older. I can really see stress in her eyes and the fact she has worked so hard, at such a young age, is written all over her face in the lines and the way she holds herself. I can also see bandages on her fingers, where she is perhaps cut them on sharp objects or farming equipment, really showing you just how bad these working conditions were, seeing as now we won’t let any children near anything sharp or dangerous.

As I learned in my last report, colour photography would have been around at this point in time. So why were these not in colour? Perhaps the photographer used this sepia tone and black and white in other images because it looks better than colour, for the reasons i said in the last report or maybe as an underlining point of aging, because these children had to grow up so fast? Or how the conditions effected there youth? Maybe it was used to have a more serious mood to the image? I am not sure, but I think visually it works well to portray the message of despair and sadness.

Some of Lewis Hine's other work I wanted to look at were the pictures he took during the construction of the empire state building, i had a particular fondness for one image called lunch atop a sky scraper.

I really love this photograph because my parents had a print of it in the kitchen while i was growing up. One thing i like about this kind of photography is how everyone can view it differently. 

One thing i really like about this style of photography is that it is real moments with real light, unlike say fashion photography. The eye has to capture these moments as they happen. I also noticed compared to the other photograph above, but not unlike a lot of other images of Hine's, the people in this photo are not even aware of the photo being taken apart from the man on the far right perhaps. I think that works well in capturing these moments, i wonder what they would have done if they knew the photo was being taken. That leads me to another thought as to where Hine was when he took this photograph, he must have been high up in order to take this. Maybe he posed as a workman or a inspector of some kind, i know he would try and gain entry, by pretending to be someone else, for the child labor photographs he took. 

It is a very interesting form of photography and has really shown me the power of photography. I am excited to see how i will use what i have learned in my own work and expand on it. I really admire the lengths Lewis Hine went to to take his photographs and it is not something you really think about, at first, when you see an photograph is what is the photographer doing.