Hine's Photo Documents

Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents
PHOTO NOTES

Elizabeth McCausland

September 1940

Editor's Note:
Putting out Photo Notes is quite a job, especially when most of the people who could write something of interest to our membership, are so very busy. That is why it is so gratifying to be able to present this artwork by Miss Elizabeth McCausland. Although she is kept very busy by her work as art critic for the Springfield (Mass.) Republican and other art magazines, Miss McCausland has never let us down when we've contacted her to write for Photo Notes, As a member of our advisory board, and as a steady contributor to Photo Notes, she has given much of her time and energy to the League. We wish to tale this opportunity to thank Miss McCausland for both her very fine article on Mr. Hine and for her work regarding the League.

Good news for Documentary Photography is the announcement that one hundred of Lewis W. Hine's photographs of immigration have been deposited as a permanent record in the library of the Russell Sage Foundation, 130 E. 22 Street. New York City. Here is the nucleus for a photographic archive which can go far, by adding more photographs of a documentary character, both by Hine and by present-day documentary photographers. Furthermore the example of the foundation (which was one of Hine's early sponsors in the publication of his photographs in the Pittsburgh Survey may well encourage other institutions to inaugurate similar photographic collections. The importance of preserving such documents for the future cannot be over-estimated in these times of rapid social change.
Unit I of Hine's "Series of Photographic Documents of Social Conditions: 1905-1939" comprises one hundred prints on Immigration from 1905 to 1926. The library may possibly acquire within the near future a second series on child labor. Other subjects for series include men at work, refugees of the first World War, life in America during the Depression, and so forth.
Hine's photographic career began in a period of social ferment and reform. In 1899 Florence Kelley had come to New York to administer the National Consumer 'a League which, with the Child Labor Committee, was to be the spearhead of the movement for protective legislation for woman and child workers. The first decade of the twentieth century in America saw the rise of the muckrakers--Ida H. Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens--who sought to clean house by informing the public of sordid social and industrial facts. A militant organ of this movement was the magazine, the Survey, which gave Hine his earliest support and publication. In such a period a photographer could be of tremendous value, as Florence Kelley testified when she wrote of Hine's child labor photographs, "The camera is convincing. Where records fail and parents forswear themselves, the measuring rod and the camera carry conviction."
At this time the United States had not yet closed its "open door" to immigrants. The nation, being in a phase of industrial expansion, wanted cheap labor. Through Ellis Island, under the "Dead Pan" countenance of the Statue of Liberty (how many betrayals, America, have you made of the "huddled masses yearning to be free!"), passed as many as 5000 immigrants a day. From 1906 to 1926 (the period covered by the Hine series) approximately 14,000,000 men, women and children catered America through the bottleneck of Ellis Island. In 1907 alone the total was 1,290,000, while from 1820 to the present it is over 38,000,000. When immigration was restricted in 1926, the yearly total dropped to 300,000.
Here is a great drama of American history, the mingling of many peoples to bring forth on this continent a new nation. The millions came steerage, clad in peasant costumes or sometimes in secondhand shirts, sweaters, coats of American cut, the women with their heads tied up in handkerchiefs or shawls, often balancing on their heads bundles of the possessions they had managed to bring with them. After two weeks on the ocean, in the ill-ventilated, overcrowded, below-water quarters of third class, they were herded into detention at Ellis Island. The tremendous dormitories were jammed with iron beds; three tiers high; there were no mattresses, no sheets, only heaps of blankets in a corner of the room. Here the millions had to wait until their relatives came to claim them. Men were allowed to leave if they had a stated amount of money; but women and children had to stay--often it must have seemed as if for all eternity.
Crowded together, shoved hither and thither, tagged and ticketed, tied to their bundles and baskets which they could not put down anywhere because they would not be permitted to return for them, bewildered by new conditions, handicapped by the language problem, these new Americans continued to pour into America. By 1924 one-third of our population of 95,000,000 were either immigrants or the children of foreign-born parents.
Luckily for history Lewis Hine was present at this great drama--wangling his way in despite refusals, burning off his eyebrows with over-enthusiastic doses of flashlight powder, photographing, setting down the visual record of the greatest migration in history. The photographs of Hine give a face to those cipher millions, make them come alive for us today, so that we perceive them not as the "wretched refuse" of some teeming foreign shore, but as human beings with hopes and aspirations, with dreams to be free and happy, seeking a new life in the promised land of freedom and opportunity, courageously braving the new world. This could be a story read with the mind, not speaking to the heart. But the Hine photographs add vital experiences; they make history human and real."These things I have seen and known" these photographic documents say. The past can never again be a table of statistics; it must be the flux of human lives in epochal social movements.
The story does not end with Ellis Island. It reaches out into the vast economic structure of America--into Pittsburgh's coal and steel, into Detroit's auto industry, into rich farmlands of the Middle West, into the slums and sweatshops of New York City, into construction camps and railroad building, into the textile mills of the South, intro the canneries, into the tobacco plantations, into the cranberry bogs, everywhere where there has been work to be done and human labor to be obtained at as low a cost as possible.
Hine's camera followed the immigrants. It saw a Slovak sitting on the doorstep of a steel worker's home in Homestead, Pa., playing an accordion."The pursuit of happiness" in a town where striking workers had been shot down by Pinkertons? It saw Italian and Jewish families (father, mother and several children) toiling under the light of kerosene lamps at "home work"--perhaps partly finished ready-made men's wear, perhaps artificial flowers, perhaps shelling nuts--the youngest children too small to reach the table edge. It saw small girls standing on boxes to operate machines in hosiery mills, their hands unguarded against the mechanically operated needles. It saw the bare wooden bunks of a construction camp for New York State's barge canal, and also the company-run saloon where the construction workers would leave most if not all of their wages. It saw young boys in coal breakers, overseer standing by with rod--"Spare the rod, and spoil the child," you know. It saw babies sleeping on sidewalks, newsboys out at 1 a. m. to sell Sunday papers, bootblacks, telegraph messengers, boys playing on dumps and scavenging in garbage cans, woman carrying home boxes as big as themselves for firewood. Again misery is given a face by the camera, supplied with that visual reality we cannot doubt.
No record except the picture can recreate for the historian precisely this visual experience, Of course pictures alone will not tell all of history; and Hine has wisely supplemented Unit I with documents of other sorts, photostats of newspaper clippings, labels with typed data relevant to the photograph's subject, identifying information, as place, date, etc. Certainly in our time photography seems to be the pictorial medium best suited to the documentary function, having attributes which carry conviction--i.e., capacity to render textures and materials, sharp definition 60 that documents incorporated within a picture (as signs, street names and numbers, captions on placards, etc.) may be recorded in easily legible form. Truly, as Beaumont Newhall has eloquently written, "the still photograph stops time, and holds it for us. Herein lies, perhaps, the greatest power of the camera. What has been recorded la gone forever....the photograph not only documents a period but records the vision of a person and a period."
Doubly true when the photograph records perishable human flesh, the actors in rapid social transformation. Even if the restrictions on immigration were to be removed, that era could not be repeated; the economic and social forces which documents it about have run their course, and new forces control life today. Never again, we imagine, can the "joys and sorrows of Ellis Island" be as poignant as in that time thirty-five years ago when the millions were "climbing into America." Hence the added value as record and document of the Hine photographs.
The unit now in the Russell Sage Foundation Library (which at present are being used for reference in the library and in classes of the New York School of Social Work) has been prepared so as to emphasize the social usefulness of Hine's work rather than purely esthetic qualities. The 5 X 7 prints are mounted on gray cardboard and protected in glassine envelopes. A card bearing typed data about the photograph is pasted below the prima, so that visual and verbal information is supplied practically simultaneously. Obviously the sensible way to make use of such material; for the nuisance of turning over the mount to read material on the back would be great. The mounted prints are kept in pressboard folders for further protection, being numbered so that the order may be preserved. On the whole, the arrangement is admirable, although one questions if it would not have been truer to the documentary ideal to number the photographs in chronological sequence, especially as history exists in a time continuum.
Interesting theoretical questions arise about standards for the filing and preservation of photographic documents. If institutions devoted to the furtherance of knowledge only had unlimited material resources photographs might be protected in various ways, as coating the print with a thin sheet of plastic (a very successful but so far expensive method ( or lacquering with air-brush, as has been done with a set of exhibition prints of Berenice Abbott and in the photo-gravures of the Paul Strand portfolio, "Photographs of Mexico." The second method is less expensive, but still too costly of labor to allow it to be widely used.
The problem of how much data and what sort of data is needed for documentary photographs also arises. The present generation of workers in this field has benefited so greatly by the experience and example of their predecessors, notably Hine, that they are now able to define standards for collateral text. Unquestionably a good documentary photograph becomes a better document when we know as much as possible about the circumstances which surround it--the place and date first of all, but after that the background which makes the photograph significant in relation to its social matrix. No fact is trivial when we think of such material as being the source book from which a better understanding of contemporary civilization can be deduced. Obviously it a photograph of a child at work in a cotton mill is to be used as an argument to persuade Congress to pass a child labor amendment to the constitution, then we should know the age of the child, the hours it works, its wage, size of the family, family income, state of health, amount of schooling, etc. , everything which will enable us to recreate a social picture of poverty, misery and exploitation so inescapable and so terrifying that perforce members of Congress will vote for the amendment.
A great deal of information of this character exists for the Hine photographs, and much of it has been collated with the prints--which is excellent. In some cases a little further research would add specific data where the present facts are of a general nature. This is the sort of activity which our educational institutions could prosecute very successfully.