Beschreibung:

THE FACE OF MODERNISM: A PRIVATE WEST COAST COLLECTION Lewis Wickes Hine Six year old newsboy. Raymond Miller. Many of these here ranging from five to ten years old. Location: San Antonio, Texas, October 1913 Gelatin silver print. 4 3/4 x 6 3/4 in. (12.1 x 17.1 cm) Numbered ‘3564’ in an unidentified hand in pencil on the verso.
Provenance Lee Gallery, Winchester Private Collection, New York Catalogue Essay In 1901 Lewis Wickes Hine began teaching at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a school led by Frank Manny, a strong advocate for advanced teaching principles. Already interested in the role photographers could play as conveyers of an otherwise unseen reality, Hine began photographing immigrants in Ellis Island in order to raise awareness of their hardships among his students. Soon thereafter, Hine pursued a Master’s degree in sociology, which he combined with his photography skills to create one of the strongest social-documentary oeuvres at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Comissioned by the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Hine began traveling across the country to record the subpar working conditions that plagued factories nationwide. In doing so, he produced over one-thousand photographs documenting the conditions to which young children were subjected in the workforce. Hine captioned each image, sometimes identifying the location, other times identifying the individuals, and most often, the age of the children. In the current lot and Selected Images (lot 10) Hine utilized the accessibility of print media to American homes as a way of raising awareness of the working conditions inside factories across the country. Indeed, following the mass circulation of the images, the NCLC successfully passed legislation in 1916 prohibiting child labor. Read More