Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine photographed children at work in American mills and mines and the pictures helped make it illegal. He was a sociology teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York - Paul Strand was his pupil, and it was Hine who took the class to Stieglitz's gallery at 291 - and he began by photographing immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, more than two hundred times over several years, treating them with a formal dignity the era's cartoons denied them. From 1908 he worked for the National Child Labor Committee, and the method was investigative as much as photographic: he talked his way into mills as a fire inspector or a bible salesman, memorised heights against the buttons on his own coat to estimate ages, and recorded names, hours and wages in a notebook so the pictures could not be dismissed as anecdote. The photographs of breaker boys in coal chutes and barefoot spinners reaching into machinery were used in campaigns for two decades and are part of why federal child labour law eventually passed. He photographed the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930-31, hanging out over the city in a specially made basket. His last years were poor: the Farm Security Administration would not hire him, he lost his house, and he died on relief in 1940. The Museum of Modern Art had turned his archive down. The Empire State photographs were published as Men at Work in 1932. Around five thousand of his negatives went to the George Eastman House after his death. His term for the work was photo-story, and he wrote the captions himself.

• Lived: 1874 CE – 1940 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist