on November 4, 1940 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a
few miles from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson.
This was ten months after the death of Sara Ann
(Rich) Hines, his wife of 35 years.
Born on 26 September 1874 in Oshkosh, Wis-
consin, from necessity, Hine worked in various
manual labor jobs in Oshkosh for seven years fol-
lowing his graduation from high school in 1892 and
the death of his father in the same year. He man-
aged to study sculpture and drawing during this
period of his life and studied for a year at the
University of Chicago, but it was his relocation to
New York City in 1901 that set the course towards
his important photographic career.
In 1903, Hine taught himself the basics of photo-
graphy at the urging of Frank A. Manny, the director
of the Ethical Culture (Fieldston) School in River-
side, New York, where Hine taught nature studies
and geography. Hine’s initial interest in photography
was as another tool to be used in his job as a teacher.
and it was at the urging of Manny that Hine began to
photograph immigrants at Ellis Island in New York
Harbor, the work beginning with school field trips
meant to counter the racist and generally anti-immi-
grant stereotypes common among the middle class
and upper classes. Following what must be regarded
as one of the richest apprenticeships in the history of
photography in completing this extraordinary study
in 1909, Hine became a professional photographer.
His approach to photography remained instrumental
throughout his career, guided by his ideas about
society and education, which were rooted—rather
loosely—in the politics of the Progressive Movement
and concretely in the ideas of John Dewey (with
whom Hine may have taken a course while at the
University of Chicago) and his training in the new
discipline of sociology. In any case, it is clear from his
degree in education from New York University,
received in 1905, and from his studies in sociology
at Columbia University in 1907, but above all from
the evidence of his photographs, that the influence of
Dewey’s ideas outweighed any others.
In 1905, Hine met Arthur Kellogg, an important
social reformer, to whom he sold some of his Ellis
Island images. In 1907, he also photographed for
the massive sociological study, The Pittsburgh Sur-
vey. Somehow he managed to photograph a series
on Washington, D.C. slums for the reformist maga-
zine,The Survey, that same year. This led to his
freelancing for and eventual hiring by the National
Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1908, which
publishedThe Surveyand which assigned Hine to
photograph and collect data on tenement home-
workers. As a full-time investigator and photogra-
pher for NCLC, Hine resigned his teaching position
at the Ethical Culture School, ‘‘changing [his] edu-
cational efforts from the classroom to the world.’’
He continued his photography of labor, moving
to concentrate on child labor, which he continued
until 1917. During that period he traveled tens of
thousands of miles mostly in the southern, eastern,
and southeastern states photographing children
working in mines, mills, sweatshops, and every sort
of factory, which employed them for 10 to 14 hour
days, six days a week of relentless, deadening, cheap
labor. The photographs and the data were used in
publications, lantern slide illustrated lectures, and to
successfully lobby Congress, which enacted the first
laws regulating child labor. Looking at these maga-
zines and at photographs of the lobby boards, Hine
also influenced notions of sequence, serial presenta-
tion, and the rudiments of photojournalism.
By training, education, and inclination, Hine was
a cultured and witty man, far more sophisticated
about contemporary and modern art than his con-
temporary Alfred Steiglitz was about the art inher-
ent in the documentary traditions of photography.
It is those traditions arising from the combination of
social expectations (what are photographs for and
how the viewer understands them) and the then new
technology of photo-mechanical reproduction that
reached a critical juncture in Hine’s work.
Aspects of, among many others, the work of
nineteenth century photographers Mathew Brady
and Timothy O’Sullivan provide a context for mea-
suring Hine’s contribution. Preceding Hine by a
generation, Jacob Riis’s muckraking photographs
seem to overlap some of Hine’s concerns; however,
among many differences the most important are
that Riis hired professional photographers for
much of the work credited to him, and unlike
Hine, Riis photographed types. From his early
work at Ellis Island to his last important project,
photographing the construction of the Empire State
Building, Hine’s photographs are about the indivi-
dual person or group of people seen individually, if
in a social context. Following Hine, and more fruit-
fully linked to him is Paul Strand. Strand, a student
at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and a mem-
ber of the camera club Hine directed there, is right-
fully recognized as an originator of Modernism in
photography, but Strand’s social concerns and
socialist politics rooted in the Progressive politics
of the School are given short shrift by photo writers
following the anti-political lead of Steiglitz.
Hine named—and in some significant way
created—what he called ‘‘Social Photography,’’ or
what is now more commonly called documentary
photography. It should be noted that this use of the
term documentary was first applied to films and didHINE, LEWIS