Art Institute of Chicago

Newsies at Skeeter Branch, St. Louis, Missouri, 11:00 a.m.

Lewis Wickes Hine

Date

May 9, 1910

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

United States

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Beginning in 1906, Lewis Hine was employed by the National Child Labor Committee to photograph and investigate scenes of child labor across the country. He produced some five thousand images of deplorable working and living conditions for children—some just four or five years old—in coal mines, cotton mills, canneries, and farms, sometimes posing as a fire inspector or postcard salesman to gain access. Hine composed his images to elicit sympathy from viewers, adding captions noting his subjects’ ages, heights, or work histories. Interested in art as a means to enhance persuasion and critical thinking rather than to create things of rarefied beauty, Hine distributed his photographs in reformist or popular magazines; they were also made into graphic posters and employed as lantern slides in lectures. It was relatively hard to inspire compassion for those in the “street trades,” especially newspaper delivery boys (newsies), whom contemporary literature both valorized and sentimentalized. The committee, however, demonstrated that in no other occupation were children so unsupervised and that the harsh city environment exposed them to physical danger and adult vices. The young boys seen here, smoking like their elders, seem prematurely hardened to life on the street.

The authoritative record is held by Art Institute of Chicago. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.