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LEWIS W. HINE
"Social Photographer"

By Elizabeth McCausland

Thirty-five years ago Lewis Hine began to photograph men at work, boys in gangs, city street scenes, Ellis Island immigrants, garment workers carrying bundles of unfinished clothing to complete in their home "sweatshops."
Thirty years ago he gave up teaching to enter the field of visual education as a "social photographer."
From 1908 on, his photographs of child labor, slum homes, coal mines, steel mines, cannery villages, construction camps, Negro tenements in Washington, drought victims in Arkansas in 1931, communities like Scotts Run, West Virginia, have been printed in numerous publications, such as the old Charities and the Commons, the Survey, the Outlook, Everybody's, and in studies like the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907-8 and Weller's Neglected Neighbors of the National Capital, as well as his own Men at Work.
Only the National Geographic (with its pictures of pierced noses etc.) found his work to "sordid" to publish:
[[stamp: McCAUSLAND ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART]]
During these years, Hine's work was widely used by social agencies, as the National Child Labor Committee, the National Consumers League, the Interchurch Council, and a dozen others.
Owen R Lovejoy, the Child Labor Committee's executive secretary, has written recently that Hine's photographs were "more responsi-