Past Exhibits October 2003 to Present

Exhibition of Works by Lewis Hine
Exhibition December 13, 2003–March 7, 2004

Young Newsie Working Pathetic Story, 1908- George Eastman House

The exhibition Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor was on display at the Brooklyn Historical Society from December 13, 2003 to March 7, 2004. 

Among the most influential photographs of Lewis Hine’s career, this exhibition presented 25 gelatin silver prints of children at work in New York City—as newsies, bootblacks, pieceworkers at home, and factory laborers—taken from 1906 to 1916, which helped to change the course of history.

Born in 1874 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Lewis Wickes Hine was an educator and sociologist whose photographs captured his concern for immigrants and working-class people.  Early in his career, he documented the newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island.  After World War I, as America became infatuated with modern machinery, Hine began to photograph men and women in the newly mechanized environment, thus emphasizing the human side of modern technology.

Lewis Wickes Hine was hired in 1906 by the National Child Labor Committee to document the harsh working conditions of children in the United States. He spent the next ten years photographing children in canneries, coal mines, farms, and sweatshops throughout the country.  This exhibition revealed the appalling circumstances that poor, working-class children endured until legislation against child labor prevailed.  It was drawn from the George Eastman House’s photographic collection, which contains nearly 10,000 of Hine’s original photographs, negatives, and artifacts.  The Hine collection, which was given to the Eastman House in 1955 by the Photo League of New York, is the world’s largest holding of his work. Hine showed how entrenched child labor was in this country. With the help of crusaders like Hine, federal child labor legislation was finally signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938.

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