In the Poetry Class we’re quoting, Ellen Reiss asked: “Are you worried in behalf of the whole world or for yourself alone?” 

I speak now about the photographer Lewis Hine, who was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and lived from 1874 to 1940.  To a large extent he had worry about something big.  He bought his first camera in 1903 and with it began exposing the horrible conditions that children at the turn of the century were forced to undergo working factories and farms.  Mary Panzer writes in her book on Hine: 

"Once children entered the workforce there were no limits on working hours, no minimum wage, no safety regulations, and no compensation for injuries....[Hine] traveled constantly.  In the summer he visited agricultural sites, strawberry fields and tobacco plantations."   [This is children laboring in the fields.] 

"In the winter he visited textile mills in the south; and northwest where children helped to spin cotton and knit stockings. [This is little Leo, working in a textile mill.] 

Ms. Reiss asked if worry, like art, can put opposites together.  I believe it does and it shows in the beauty of Lewis Hine’s photographs.  And through these photographs, worry is presented in a way that has us feel not just something narrow, something “zeroed-in” on, but as related to the structure of the whole world. 

This is titled “Meyer Klein, small newsie, downtown Saturday afternoon, St. Louis, Mo., May 7, 1910.”   Here we see the opposites of one and many, separate and joined: a small boy, very alone, is surrounded by people who don’t seem to see him.  There are hidden and shown: his is the only face we see clearly; others’ are hidden. 

And there is that face: it’s imploring, pained, a little hopeful, distressed.  But that face is looking up and out to the world.  You see bodies in motion--the man casually walking by with his hands in his pockets, the women on the left with a bright hat.  Meanwhile, a small boy is given grandeur by three things: he is the center of a solid geometrical form where two diagonals meet; he is given solidity by the tall, vertical lamppost behind him.  And that decoration on the lamppost is almost like a crown.  There is a child so small, shown to be grand by how Lewis Hine saw him.   This is what we need to do with our own worry: widen out, see our relation to the world and people. 

And we see this done in another great photo.  Here is “Rhodes Mfg. Co. Spinner: A moment’s glimpse of the outer world.  Said she was 11 years old.  Been working over a year.  Lincolnton, N.C., Nov. 11, 1908.” We see a girl with her back to a massive spinning machine, looking yearningly outside.  She’s so still and yet we have a sense of her thoughts, and we know these machines behind her pouring out cloth are moving at incredible speed.  This photograph made me think of the moving poem by Margaret Widdemer “The Golf Links”: 
 

     The golf links lie so near the mill, 
     That almost every day, 
     The laboring children can look out, 
     And see the men at play.

Look at how the opposites of depth and surface, dark and bright work in this.  On one side of a diagonal going back are these tremendous machines; on the other, one girl.  As the wall she’s facing goes back into the depths, her thoughtful head is surrounded by bright light.  As the diagonals travel back and forward, the forms take on the quality we can imagine of her mind: a going deep, a coming out.  Vagueness, mistiness interplay with the solidity of her pigtail, her pushed up sleeves, her ruffled apron.  Hine gave a specific child relation to the geometry of reality, and in doing so, he gave her dignity and meaning.  Do we need to see our own worry this way: as related to not only the geometry of things, but also to the thoughts and worries of other people?  Yes! 

Lewis Hine’s worry about these children made the world a better place.  Panzer writes: 
 

Over the period of Hine’s greatest works, conditions did improve.  Factories grew safer and cleaner, and for the most part, ceased employing under the age of 14.

Hine wrote of his photographs and their purpose: 
 

For many years I’ve followed the procession of children’s workers....I have heard their tragic stories, watched their cramped lives, and…their fruitless struggle in the industrial game where the odds were all against them....The object of employing children is to get high profits from their work.  Not only from their work, the employer of children forces all wages down to the level of the child’s wage.

IV.  Our worries and being true to ourselves

Critics have felt that in the early 1920s there was a falling off in the power and beauty of Hine’s photography.  I think several factors came together that made for this.  He now had terrific worry about money: his wife was ill and he had to support a new family.  He was having a hard time getting commissions, and one can ask whether there was anger at him for the injustices he’d exposed.  I also think perhaps Hine himself didn’t see how proud he should be.  He wrote, “I thought I’d done my share of negative documentation, and I wanted to do something positive.  So I said to myself, Why not show the worker at work?” 

What he’d done wasn’t “negative”: it was gloriously “positive.”  But I believe he didn’t see how much he should be proud of a worry “in behalf of the whole world.” And this matter is for all of us: We can ask, was Hine in any way tired of looking at people’s pain?  Did he want to get to something “nicer”?  Did he feel he took care of just “Lewis Hine” by having so much feeling for the children?  And so there was a shift.  Mary Panzer writes: 

In the 1920s, as Hine began to work for commercial clients, he adopted a less critical approach to the subject of labor, which he named “Interpretive Photography.”

I feel these do not stand for his best work: [This is Expert Linotyper and Woman Sewing]. They’re too static, too symmetrical.  There’s too much light, and there is a flaccid feeling; there is none of that great drama of dark and light, softness and hardness, of pain and the permanent abstractions of reality. There seems to be a false contentedness in the people who were being exploited for profit, and unfortunately his photographs were used in companies’ annual reports to show how happy their workers were. 

But I believe this work distressed Hine very much, and there came to be another worry in him which I believe did him great justice.  Mary Panzer tells us: "Colleagues...remember a man who looked far older than his years.  Hine could not hide his deepening depression." 

No one seems to know why there was this depression.  I feel that without knowing it, there was something very good in him that worried about betraying himself.  In
an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel asked me, “What do you think you’re most afraid of in yourself?” 

JC.  I’m afraid I may lose touch with things. 

ES.  Do you think there is any such thing as being true to oneself?  What do you think it means? 

JC.  I’m not sure. 

ES.  It means this: that you go by all of yourself as much as possible, more of yourself, rather than less.... 

I think this was what Hine was worried about.  And I believe in this later work he got back to more of his true feeling.  In 1930, Hine began photographing the men who built the Empire State Building. It is called “Men at Work.”  The men respected him as he, with his bulky camera, photographed them working high over Manhattan, balancing himself on the steel girders, and sometimes from a basket that was pushed out 30-40 feet from the ever-rising building. 

This is the stirring photograph “Sky Boy.” I believe Hine could feel he was truer to himself as he showed his respect and concern for this workingman.  This man is both soaring and also grounded securely on that diagonal.  There is dark and light, massive and delicate at one. 

 “To like oneself,” Ms. Reiss said in the class, “we also have to feel we’re personally worried about something that is in the world other than ourselves.”  We’re very glad to be looking at this subject and that it has people see, as Aesthetic Realism shows, the way we can be proud of how we worry.