On Art

...and tots lug bundles of piecework larger than they are...

...By 1932, 60 million settlers had passed through its gates...

...He traveled throughout the land visiting—frequently with difficulty?coal mines, textile mills, farms, and other places where children were exploited...

...The new American workers did not fare physically much worse than the old ones...

...There is nothing very unusual about the man's early days...

...The school had changed character somewhat by the time Hine arrived, but remained a progressive force committed to social change...

...Hine (1874-1940) saw himself primarily as a reformer, and he was very aware that—in his own words?While the camera may not lie, liars may photograph...

...He studied stenography, drawing and sculpture in whatever time remained from his exertions in an upholstery factory, a clothing store and other such establishments...

...Perhaps the streets were safe in that halcyon era because potential delinquents had neither the time nor the energy to mug...

...When he finally took his single shot, the survivors of steerage would be "silly or stony or weeping with hysteria because the bystanders had been busy pelting them with advice and comments...

...From 1908-18 the photographer was employed by the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC...

...Actually, he combined the virtues of the two...

...The plain style of both men reflects an unsentimental regard for the working class, without whose sweat technology is useless...

...Yet one senses that his proletarian suffering was as voluntary as Orwell's going on the road as a hobo, and as much the result of internal conflict over the choice of a career as of poverty...

...If his compositions achieve the status of disinterested works of art, Trachtenberg observes, that is because "he created his own subject matter as much as Brady had...

...Returning to the earlier prints, one sees that this serenity was there throughout—in the perfect picture of a woman hurrying along on a dark city street, an immense crate balanced on her head...

...Taking his lead from his mighty subject," writes Trachtenberg, he became involved in the construction "by serving as its faithful reflection...

...Founded in 1877 by Felix Adler to improve the intellectual and working lot of the artisan, ECS played a large part in the reform movement of the post-Civil War boom and received further stimulus from the massive immigration starting in the 1880s...

...Clearly, life in the U.S...

...True, a string of unrewarding jobs he took after graduating from high school provided him with firsthand experience of the way the majority survived...

...The situation at the turn of the century is crisply outlined in Alan Trachtenberg's very good catalogue essay...

...Straightback-ed little girls toil at huge looms...

...He chose Hine to carry out the idea...

...Of course, there were mitigating factors...

...Whatever expertise the teacher of geography lacked (there is no evidence he handled a camera before going to ECS), he gained the hard way on Ellis Island...

...small boys crouch above coal chutes, breaking the lumps into a manageable size...

...In the '20s he embarked on a project whose focus was well-fed craftsmen using their skills for more than merely receiving a paycheck...

...in the portrait of a black baby girl ensconced outside a "temporary home for colored children...

...An important member of the social-realist movement that began in the 19th century and a contemporary of painters John Sloan and George Luks, Hine is classified as a spiritual descendant of Walt Whitman because he believed in the primacy and dignity of labor...

...These pictures are not considered to be among his finest productions, for they are bland in a National Geographic sort of way...

...Ellis Island opened in 1892 and was soon processing as many as 5,000 bodies a day...

...The conclusion is understandable in the light of some of his later work, but generally Hine's sensibility lacks the poet's theatrical yeastiness...

...One of the loveliest prints in the show is an Impressionist-style idyll of smiling women sitting on a sunlit roof, their laundry flapping on the line and a baby lying on a mattress...

...Nonetheless, the prints demonstrate a keen eye for male beauty, especially the one of a welder at the Norris Dam site, his goggles up, his eyes squinting at the sun...

...Still, their ordeal having in many respects just gotten under way, the immigrants look relatively composed...

...Unlike Orwell, Hine was no renegade bourgeois, though as the son of a res-tauranteur in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he was hardly born at the bottom, either...

...One has to mentally retrace the trauma of the trip to the new world from the hamlets of Southern and Eastern Europe...

...For the zest with which this nation admitted the hordes was matched only by its indifference to their welfare...

...Anyone who thinks the Lower East Side is overcrowded now should, we are told, have seen it then...

...And if entire families had to labor far into the night shelling nuts—and being fined for broken meats—there was always tar beach for relaxation...

...This fact may be attributable to the children of the modern dispossessed being in some ways worse off—bored and lacking value even as factory fodder...

...Nevertheless, his theme in these photographs, as in many others, is character transcending squalor and injustice...

...Possibly, then, the show's ultimate message is that although this classicist kept his estheticism on a tight rein, it rebelled and claimed him in the end...

...While the premature gravity of the faces is terrible, these pictures are strangely undramatic...

...Manny, like other concerned educators of the day—notably Professor Peabody, creator of Harvard's social ethics department?was convinced that photographing the avalanche of cheap labor would hasten the improvement of working conditions...

...others looked at the same scene, but Hine saw what he was looking at...

...and in the portrait of a bearded baker sitting with a cat among pans of dough...

...For all the misery they depict and for all the years the photographer spent investigating degradation and exploitation, there is no call here to overthrow the system—only the appeal to make it more humane...

...Then details such as the embroidered bodice on a young Italian mother and a young Albanian woman's handwov-en headcloth and blouse become particularly poignant...

...Equally moving is the resilience of the pioneers in adapting to a new life...

...His mission was not simply to, arouse the compassion of the haves, but to bluntly and unromantically impress upon them the cost of their goods and conveniences to the have-nots, whether native child laborers or immigrants fresh off the boat...

...In this he was more fortunate than most social realists, whose work is beyond reviving, except for nostalgic reasons...

...I would put him closer to the George Orwell who wrote about the "common decency" of ordinary people...

...The exhibition includes an amusing letter from him describing the ritual of detaining weary subjects—who must have perceived posing for pictures as the last mad straw—for what seemed an eternity as he wrestled with the primitive equipment of those days...

...His camera was no mere recording device...

...Of these, the Survey was, until the '30s, his most dependable employer, the NCLC's shabby money dealings with him having prompted his resignation...

...The photographer's last great assignment was to cover the erecting of the Empire State Building...

...Never very successful financially —he died in poverty—the photographer was compensated by gaining wide exposure through his reports for the NCLC and his reproductions appearing in reform-oriented magazines...

...his own seeing participated in the act he photographed...

...In these Mondrian-like shots of vertical and horizontal beams, surmounted by men who perch like birds in transit, Hine unveils himself, surprisingly, as a classicist...

...Since he was not an Expressionist in the George Grosz sense of the term, Hine wearied eventually of reporting the negative side of industrialism...

...TT JL JLine was unique: He steadfastly rejected the appellation of art photographer, and he could not be classified as a photojournalist...

...The turning point in his life came in 1901, after he had spent a year at the University of Chicago...

...On Art HUMANE PHOTOGRAPHY BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Although America & Lewis Hine is influenced to some extent by the work of Jacob Riis, the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, (through May 15) is no fix for nostalgia addicts...

...was an improvement over a European death by persecution or famine—although the pictures Hine took in Turkey at the end of World War I indicate that hope, not food, was the main ingredient missed by the poor...

...This show, documenting the building of modern America as seen from below, consists of 220 pictures, printed by Hine himself between 1904-40...

...Frank Manny, a professor at the State Normal School, was appointed superintendent of the Ethical Culture School (ECS) in New York, and he invited Hine to join him there as a teacher of nature study and geography...