Lewis Hine sought to save innocent children who toiled for long, brutal hours in factories, mills, mines, canneries, and farms, and in the streets, using a singular device: his camera.

Working her fifth season, Ann Parion, 13, carried 60 pounds of berries from the fields to the sheds at Newton’s farm in Delaware. At age 6, Willie Cherry helped her stepbrother at the Massey Hosiery Mill in Georgia. In a 1915 photo by Hine, an 8-year-old boy grimaces as he works to remove the top off beets. In 1911, Hine captured a line of shrimp-pickers for the Biloxi Canning Company, recording their ages in his report: “Two children of five years. One of seven years. Two of eight years. One of nine. Two of ten. Two of eleven (one who had been working at this factory two years). Three of twelve, (one working here 4 years and one two years).” Through his camera, Hine showed the work lives of these children – and many more.

Documenting these child laborers in various states, Hine risked his life, under threat of killing and other violence from factory security officers and foremen, to photograph their duress and exploitation. He used guises to elude detection or waited until he could take pictures of them outside the workplaces. Hine’s photos are so evocative and powerful that in viewing these children, one can feel the dirt and darkness of cramped factory quarters, sense the difficulty and grime of shucking oysters for long hours, and see the strain upon small arms and backs of carrying crates of fruit or bending over without a break.

In this 1910 photo, Salvin Nocito, 5 years of age, is seen carrying two pecks of cranberries to the “bushel-man” at a farm in Browns Mills, N.J.

Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division

The finely told and moving exhibit at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz – Lewis Hine, Child Labor Investigator – offers an exceptional opportunity to see a range of Hine’s photographs that played a vital role in the passage of child labor legislation in the United States. The exhibit is on view through July 11 in the museum’s Sara Bedrick Gallery. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. (The exhibit first opened Feb. 6.) Anna Conlan, curator and exhibitions manager, and Amy Fredrickson, curatorial and collections assistant, co-curated the exhibit.

Hine’s focus on children is not surprising given the experiences of his own childhood, and how his education and training further forged a path to delve into their lives. Hine was born in 1874 and raised in Oshkosh, Wisc. When his father died in an accident in 1892, Hine had to work to help support his family financially. He worked in a furniture upholstery factory for 13 hours a day, 6 days a week, and then did other odd jobs, as a bank janitor and delivery boy, becoming determined to pursue higher education. He took university extension courses in Oshkosh and was able to enroll at the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology under economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen.

After Hine became a teacher, a school administrator whom he had known through the university extension courses, Frank Manny, hired him to become an educator at the Ethical Culture School in New York, where Manny had become the superintendent, according to Hine’s biography in the International Photography Hall of Fame. Under a school program, Hine took his students to Ellis Island and photographed the arriving immigrants. He began to grasp the ability of photography to convey the real lives of people and be a force for social change.

“Respect and Compassion”

Through his photography becoming better known and his various connections, Hine landed an assignment with the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1908. For the NCLC over a period of 16 years, Hine traveled from the Carolina Piedmont and Mid-Atlantic to the Gulf Coast and Midwest, logging up to 30,000 miles a year. He lugged his camera and equipment to photograph children as laborers in canning factories, mills, sweatshops, and mines, and on farms and out on the streets. He took notes of names, ages, and other details, as he talked with the children. Along the way, as the exhibit describes, Hine “listened with respect and compassion to their stories.”

The Dorsky exhibit has an excellent and emblematic range of Hine’s child labor photography, thoughtfully organized. It is comprised of a collection of gelatin silver prints that New York-based gallery owner, curator, and historian Howard Greenberg donated to the museum. All in all, Hine produced a massive number of images. The Library of Congress holds 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives in its National Child Labor Committee Collection. The Dorsky exhibit is divided into a range of industry categories that Hine investigated, such as cotton and other mills and shops, farms, and canning factories, plus the children “newsies” who sold newspapers on the streets.

This 12-year-old girl worked in the weaving room of a mill in LaGrange, Ga., for one year, helping to support a father “who works when sober.”

Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division

Looking at the photographs and reading the captions that go with each – and taking time to really look again slowly – lets it sink in how gruesome, dangerous, harmful, tedious, and inhumane this labor was. One photo shows a group of both incredibly young and older children at the Lumberton Cotton Mills in North Carolina. Hine’s caption identifies Flossie Britt, 6, “who has been working several months steadily as a spinner” and earns 30 cents a day, as well as Lonnie Britt, 7, similarly employed as a spinner, for a year. Lonnie “Makes 40 cents a day.” A 1913 photo reveals a 12-year-old girl who worked in the weave room of Consolidated Duck Mill, LaGrange, Ga., who helps support “a father who works when sober.” The children often worked barefoot in these mills, as that made it easier to climb and reach a bobbin or thread, according to exhibit text, explaining how this led to many accidents.

Hine said, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” Still, the words that he recorded, for captions and reports, are at times piercing, about the conditions and about his outrage. A 1908 photo of a “glass blower and mold boy” shows a young boy bent over slightly, holding a mold and obviously aiming to keep this position, as an adult glassblower stands opposite him. “Boy has 4½ hours of this at a stretch, then an hour’s rest and 4½ more: cramped position.” These “mold boys” crouched for many hours, opening and closing molds for adult glassblowers in factories, according to glass industry resource UrbanGlass.

The exhibit points out how Hine particularly detested conditions in the canning factories, “A line of canning factories stretches along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Louisiana,” he observed. “I have witnessed many varieties of child labor horrors…but the climax, the logical conclusion of the ‘laissez-faire’ policy regarding the exploitation of children is to be seen in the oyster-shuckers and shrimp-pickers in that locality.” Children of 8 and 9 years old stood for long hours at tables shucking oysters, at times starting shifts at 3 or 3:30 a.m. and shucking until 5 p.m. The exhibit photos show many children as oyster-shuckers or shrimp-pickers laboring in these appalling conditions in places such as Dunbar, La., and Biloxi, Miss.

A line of shrimp-pickers, in 1911, the youngest of whom are 5 and 6 years old
Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division

Progressive reformers such as the National Child Labor Committee and others campaigned for years to abolish child labor, and the exhibit summarizes the setbacks, ultimate successes, and Hine’s instrumental role. The effort took decades. As industries boomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, the number of children under the age of 15 who worked for wages in industrial jobs climbed from 1.5 million in 1890 to 2 million in 1910. In 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act, which would regulate child labor by banning the sale of products from shops, factories, and canneries that employed children under specified ages and limited working hours for others. However, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Act as unconstitutional in 1918. Finally, in 1938, during the Administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which, among various measures, vastly curtailed child labor by regulating the minimum ages for their employment (though it excluded agricultural labor).

This victory for children came just two years before Lewis Hine’s death, at age 66 in 1940, at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He had gone on to create a prolific and magnificent oeuvre, from his photographs for the Red Cross during World War I, of refugees, nurses, wounded soldiers, and others, to his commission chronicling the construction of the Empire State Building, from the pit to the skyscraper’s top. The Dorsky Museum exhibit conclusion eloquently expresses the timeless resonance of Hine’s photography: “His images still have an extraordinary power to stir minds and move hearts” in a continuing fight for children still trapped in poverty and by hunger – “as needed today as it was on the day his camera captured its first photograph.”

A boy holds a mold for the glassblower, in a cramped position for many hours, in this 1908 photo.

Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division

A young girl at the Cherokee Hosiery Mill, 1913

Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division