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Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, and Pragmatism: Photographs as Lived Experience1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Kate Sampsell Willmann
Affiliation:
Georgetown University

Abstract

The origin of Lewis Hine's invention of social documentary photography can be found in his intellectual alliance to pragmatism. Reading Hine's photographs as primary sources of the author's intent, in context with Hine's progressive intellectual milieu and in contrast with his contemporaries, Jacob Riis and Alfred Steiglitz, reveals Hine as a self-conscious and tolerant commentator on the lives of individual immigrants and workers. Although Hine left the objects of his portraits mostly unnamed, through his documentary style, he conferred upon them individual identity in contrast to the nativism, exploitation, and social Darwinism that surrounded immigration issues in the early 1900s. Through his images, Hine transmitted his own perceptions of 1900s New York City, especially Ellis Island. Since Hine was inspired by William James's formulation of “lived experience,” the historian can read Hine through a lens of James's philosophy, solving the pragmatist problem of communicated language by replacing words with images.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2008

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References

2 Lewis Hine to Paul Kellogg, Sept. 8, 1932, inPhoto Story: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine, ed. Kaplan, Dalle (Washington, 1992), 48Google Scholar.

3 Hine mentioned James and alluded to the philosophy expressed in James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” in a 1910 letter to Frank Manny (his mentor at the Ethical Culture School and to who m Hine dedicated Men at Work). See Hine to Frank Manny, May 2, 1910, in Photo Story, 5–6.

4 , Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (1932; New York, 1977)Google Scholar, frontispiece. The exact quote from James is: “Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in catdeyards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails…. These are our soldiers, our sustainers, the very parents of our life.” SeeJames, William, “What Makes a Life Significant” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (New York, 1899), 274–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hine to Paul Kellogg, Sept. 8, 1932, in Photo Story, 48.

6 For a more complete interpretation of Hine's “credo” in the context of his life and work in the 1920s, see my manuscript, “‘If I Could Tell This Story in Words…’: Lewis W. Hine and the Intellectual History of Social Documentary,” forthcoming.

7 Many writers and practitioners have dealt with the conceptual and practical problems inherent in the effort to communicate through photographs. See, for example,Trachtenberg, Alan, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, 1980)Google Scholar; and Goldberg, Vicki, ed., Photography in Print (Albuquerque, 1981).Google ScholarFor a discussion of the issue by Lewis Hine, see “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” Proceedings, National Conference of Charities and Corrections (June 1909), repr. inClassic Essays on Photography (New Haven, 1980), 110–13.Google ScholarIn this article, Hine made his famous statement, “Photographs don't lie, but liars may photograph.” If the author's message did not matter, whether he or she were liar would be moot.

8 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain op Others (New York, 2003), 39.Google Scholar

9 Hine's college transcript at the University of Chicago lists courses with Dewey in pedagogy and psychology, along with courses in history, rhetoric, education, geography, botany, geology, and physiography.

10 Paul and Arthur Kellogg began their work with the Pittsburgh Survey under the auspices of Charities, which became The Surrey in 1909 to reflect the approach pioneered in the Pittsburgh Survey. The surname Graphic was added in 1921 to acknowledge the debt owed to photographs and photographers, specifically Hine, in pursuing the causes championed by the periodical. For the Pittsburgh Survey, see Greenwald, Maurine W. and Anderson, Margo, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed (Pittsburgh, 1996).Google Scholar See alsoTrachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1989), 195–98Google Scholar; and Stange, Maren, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

11 Chambers, Clarke A., Paul U. Kellogg and the Survey: Voices for Social Welfare and Social Justice (Minneapolis, 1971).Google Scholar See also the Surrey Graphic collection at the Social Work Archives, University of Minnesota.

12 In 1918, Hine took a hiatus from the NCLC to join the American Red Cross (ARC), where he assisted in a “special survey” of European refugees conducted by Homer Folkes. He briefly returned to the NCLC at the conclusion of this service in 1920, but postwar Europe had changed Hine's outlook. Although he continued to photograph sporadically for Surrey, Hine made a conscious decision to show “the positive” side of life with depictions of affirmative activity, such as his Empire State photos, rather than portrayals of social ills.

13 For summaries of Hine' education and career, see , Kaplan's introductory essay in Photo StoryGoogle Scholar; and Trachtenberg, Alan, “Ever—The Human Document” in America and Iwnis Hine: Photographs, 1904 1940 [Exhibition] (New York, 1977), 118–12Google Scholar.

14 The standard definition of nativism remains that offered inHigham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Natirism, 1865–1920 (1955; New York, 1972).Google Scholar According to Higham, nativism “should be defined as intense opposition to an internal minority on ground of its foreign (i.e., ‘un-American’) connections” (p. 4). Nativism in this context is much more than simple xenophobia; it is a multifarious doctrine centered on protection of the nation from a variety of dangers allegedly posed by those of foreign birth or extraction. At the end of his life, Hine supported Louis Adamic's assertion that Ellis Island was as important as Plymouth Rock to the American social fabric. see , Hine, “Plans for Work,”Google Scholarin, Kaplan, Photo Story, 174Google Scholar.

15 The Lewis W. Hine Collection at the George Eastman House (GEH) in Rochester, New York, contains pamphlets and other reading materials bearing Hine's notes. Hine often highlighted and emphasized items that indicated his commitment, even at the end of his life, to include a broadly construed and inclusive concept of what made an “American.”

16 Hine always saw his images as having a unique quality. To distinguish them from what he saw as images with inferior power to persuade, he called his “Hineographs.” For Hine's designation of “social photographer,” see Seixas, Peter, “Lewis Hine: From ‘Social’ to ‘Interpretive’ Photographer,” American Quarterly 39 (Autumn 1989): 381409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and , Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 164230Google Scholar.

17 , Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 52.Google Scholar

18 Furthermore, Hine rarely identified his subjects by name and at times manipulated his captions to misidentify subjects according to needs. A photograph of a working person from Pittsburgh could easily be recaptioned for use later; after all, the photograph was of a worker in dire industrial circumstances. see , Stange, Symbols of Ideal LifeGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of Hine's caption switching. The record suggests that Hine especially switched captions amid the pressing financial difficulties of later life.

19 , Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 7879.Google Scholar

20 For example, Paul Schuster Taylor wrote about the passivity with which Florence Thompson allowed Dorothea Lange to photograph her and her children. see Taylor, Paul Schuster, “Migrant Mother: 1936,” in Photography in Print, 355–57Google Scholar.

21 Although there is no direct evidence that Hine met Meyer, Hine was “caught up” in the intellectual “ferment” of the Chicago School of Sociology. see Marks, Robert W., “Portrait of Lewis Hine,” Coronel, Feb. 1939, 1457.Google Scholar The correspondence between Hine and Marks indicates that the piece derived from conversations with Hine and that Hine approved of it before publication. According to Marks: “At [Frank] Manny's suggestion, [Hine] went to Chicago and took a degree at the University. Chicago caught up Hine like a match in a whirlpool. The century was turning; new tides of ideas were sweeping away the Victorian dross. Lincoln Steffens was alive then; and John Dewey was still a social force… It was an era of oversimplification. People still believed that to correct an abuse it was only necessary to expose it. In this ferment, Hines's patterns were set. His interest in nature extended to human nature.” Manuscript copy of Coronet article, 3, Robert Marks Collection, College of Charleston.

22 Leys, Ruth, “Types of One: Adolf Meyer's Life Chart and the Representation of Individuality,” Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 4.

23 , Leys, “Type of One,” 10Google Scholar, James quote in n29.

24 If only for himself. Hine's initial trips to Rllis Island were more for his own education as a photographer and to satisfy his social curiosity than to make a political statement, although these sentiments were reflected in his later letters. see , Kaplan, Photo StoryGoogle Scholar.

25 “Whitman” is written in Hine's hand. See Lewis Hine Collection, GHH, file 126.

26 For an introduction to the extensive scholarship linking but distinguishing Hine, and Hine, both intellectually and stylistically, see Curtis, James, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, <http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Photos/> (June 2003)+(June+2003)>Google Scholar.

27 “Introduction” inInventing America: Readings in Identity and Culture, ed. Ibieta, Gabriella and Orvell, Miles (New York, 1996), 466–67Google Scholar.

28 , Riis, The Rattle with the Slum (New York, 1902), ch. 1.Google Scholar

29 , Hine to Manny, in Photo Story, 2.Google Scholar Hine retroactively dated his early letters during his preparation for the 1938 retrospective at the Riverside Museum. Thi s letter was dated 1906, but Kaplan thinks it was actually written in 1907 (Photo Story, 2n3).

30 Climbing into America,” Survey 22 (Apr. 3, 1909): 111–14Google Scholar, quote on 111.

31 Ibid., 112.

32 The George Eastman House, the repository for Hine's personal collection of his work, gives both 1905 and 1906 as the dates for three prints they own. See <http://www.geh.org/fm/lwhprints/htmlsrc/ellis-island_sum00003.html#77:0177:0039>. The catalog America and Lewis Hine, 29, dates the photo to 1908. In preparation for the Riverside Museum retrospective, Hine dated the photograph 1906 then edited the date to 1905. The earlier dates make more sense because Ellis Island was Hine's own project; by 1908, he was photographing for the NCLC.

33 “Climbing Into America,” 111.

34 For a clear introduction, see Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York, 1992), ch. 1314Google Scholar.

35 James, William, “A World of Pure Experience,” journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 533–43, 561–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Page numbers in future citations will refer to ChristopherGreen, D., ed., Classics in the History of Psychology, An Internet Educational Resource, <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/james/experience.htm>, 113.,+1–13.>Google Scholar An expanded version of this essay appeared posthumously in a compilation work in 1912. I prefer to use the 1904 version because this is the version that Hine would have first encountered, assuming this eager student of contemporary philosophy read it early on.

36 , Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 29.Google Scholar

37 , James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 8.Google Scholar

38 Harold Edgerton (1903–1990) developed the first strobe-light flash in 1931.

39 The opposite can be said about Jacob Riis's “flashlight” image of a startled-looking young African American man sitting on a barrel, titled “A Black-and-Tan Dive in ‘Africa’ [Broome Street, about 1889].” For the image, see,Riis, Jacob A., How the Other Half Lives (1901; repr. New York, 1971), 114Google Scholar, photo added to new edition to illustrate ch. 13, “The Color Line in New York.”

40 Hine was an avid note taker when he worked for the NCLC; he took notes for other photographs at Ellis Island. If Hine made notes when he took “Climbing into America,” they are either unidentified as such or lost. See Hine Collection, file 126, for the typed caption with editorial corrections in Hine's handwriting.

41 The handwritten captions are in Hine Collection, file 127. Alan Trachtenberg left a note in June 1988 for subsequent researchers: “These notes may be by Elizabeth McCausland,” the art critic who helped organize the retrospective. The handwritten captions are in three distinct handwritings. Hine's handwriting is present, but it is not the most frequently found. There is no indication of how Trachtenberg came to his conclusion. “Waiting to get Passports checked” was written by one hand, edited by another (in a darker pen), and commented on by Hine. The four people who worked on preparing the show were Hine, McCausland, Berenice Abbott, and, one presumes, his wife Sara Hine (if not his son Corydon Hine as well). Sara Hine died on Christmas Day, 1939. One month later, Hine wrote: “There is much yet be done, finishing up and continuing lines that have been started, and in which she had a real part.” See Hine to Paul Underwood Kellogg, Jan. 25, 1940, in Photo Story, 167.

42 A web search yielded several syllabi using this image, one under the title “Climbing into the Land of Promise,” as evidence that immigrants were huddled masses, displaced and anxious. See <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/2004/3/04.03.03.x.html> and <http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~hius202/images/lecture03/climbing.htm> as examples.

43 “Climbing Into America,” 113.

44 See <http://www.geh.org/fm/lwhprints/htmlsrc/m197701770101_ful.html#topof-text> for the entry in the GEH inventory. The photograph is reproduced under the GEH name inHine, Lewis, Lewis Hine: Passionate journey, Photographs 1905–1937, ed. Steinorth, Karl (Rochester, NY, 1996), 42Google Scholar.

45 , Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 164230.Google Scholar

46 Dimock, George, Priceless Children: American Photographs, 1890–1925: Child labor and the Pictorialist Ideal (Seattle, 2002), 1315.Google Scholar

47 Sekula, Allan, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” (1975), repr. in Photography in Print, 452–73.Google Scholar Sekula offers a scathing critique of Stieglitz's symbolist assertion that he was conveying a feeling in “The Steerage.”

48 , Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 164.Google Scholar

49 Stieglitz in 1896, quoted in, Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 184Google Scholar.

50 Referring, of course, to a well-known brouhaha caused by Rothstein's pictures of a cow skull in several different positions. Rothstein, the youngest of the Farm Security Agency photographers and the only one to work his way up from being a darkroom technician, gave fuel to opponents of the FSA Historical Section, who claimed that the photographs were staged.

51 see Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997).Google Scholar

52 , James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 1.Google Scholar

53 Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago, 1973), 3345.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., 12–15, 26–5.

55 In a letter to Jane Addams, Hine described his work after the child labor days: “Since then I have been doing some interesting work in Industry, trying to interpret to the outsider what I consider to be the human basis of industry.” Hine to Jane Addams, Aug. 1933?, in Photo Story, 56.

56 An idea that becomes even more tenable when examining Hine's “work portraits,” made when Hine's finances put him in much closer class proximity to his subjects than he had ever been before.

57 , Denning, The Cultural Front.Google Scholar

58 Steichen Americanized his name to Edward in 1918 when he left the Photo Secession and began a career as a professional (read paid) photographer. See biography of Edward Steichen, International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, <http://www.iphf.org/inductees/esteichen.html>. Steichen and Stieglitz had a falling out over Steichen's to earn a living from photography.

59 Hine to Paul Kellogg, July 7, 1921, in Photo Story; 20.