Description

Meet ‘The Modern Atlas’, a  button-hole maker photographed in Washington Square, New York City in 1912. He is carrying his burden of unfinished clothes from the factory, and the photograph is subtitled ‘The Home-work Burden. Said he made button-holes at home.’ The photographer Lewis  Wickes Hine believed that documentary photography should ennoble its subjects rather than judge.

Himself from an impoverished family in the tiny rural township of Oshkosh, Minnesota, Hine’s first job after leaving school was as labourer in a factory which made upholstery for furniture. When the factory closed, he took unskilled jobs, but studied stenography and book-keeping at night school. Eventually, in 1895, he secured a post as a bank janitor and later gained promotion, becoming a clerk. A local teacher encouraged him to train as a teacher, and he eventually studied at the University of Chicago before moving to Yonkers, New York and working first as a teacher before taking up socially committed photography.

He is most famous for the photographs of child labourers which he took for the National Child Labor Committee: he may have drawn the little girl portrayed as an Atlas who features in in this Encounter. But he also photographed immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, men working on the Empire State Building, and many African Americans in order to highlight their poverty.

Hine died in poverty, after he was widowed in 1939 and his home was foreclosed. But he is now considered to be one of the most influential pioneers of documentary photography.