Archives \u2013 July 27, 2021<\/p>\n
On view till August 2 at the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North Carolina, is Our Strength Is Our People: The Humanist Photographs of Lewis Hine. The show comprises 65 vintage prints from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg. This moving and memorable exhibition is a concise survey of the life\u2019s work of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), the father of American documentary photography. Trained as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, NYU, and Columbia University, Hine became a high school teacher at New York\u2019s Ethical Culture School, a bastion of progressive education. At the time, the roiling political issue was immigration \u2013 much as it is today. Conservatives viewed immigration as a source of crime, disease, and the loss of America\u2019s essential Anglo-Saxon character, whereas Progressives saw America as a melting pot, a beacon of light for foreigners escaping poverty and tyranny. Armed with a clumsy large-format view camera and magnesium flash, Hine took his students to Ellis Island in 1905 and put a human face on the \u201chuddled masses yearning to breathe free.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hine\u2019s empathetic interest in the immigrant experience did not end at Ellis Island. In 1907 he joined the Pittsburgh Survey, a comprehensive socioeconomic analysis of a typical industrial city in America\u2019s heartland. As seen through Hine\u2019s lens, the steel that supplied the backbone of America\u2019s industry was being forged by immigrants \u2013 the Italian and the Irish, the Serb and the Slovak, now proud Americans. Hine\u2019s focus on the dignity of the American worker would last a quarter century, culminating in his magnificent photographs of the construction of the Empire State Building in 1931 and in the classic book Men at Work. His oeuvre is the humanist counterpoint to the avant garde art world\u2019s fixation on the machine as the emblem of the modern age.<\/p>\n
To Hine, however, labor was a double-edged sword. In the service of unchecked laissez-faire capitalism, it could be physically and emotionally debilitating, dehumanizing rather than empowering \u2013 never more so than when minor children are deprived of their childhoods and put to work in the factories and the field. Starting in 1908, Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee, sneaking his camera into cotton mills, canning companies, and glassworks to document the exploitation of children, always under false pretenses and often at great personal risk. Hine\u2019s heart-rending images of underage labor were the principal tool used by the NCLC to lobby state-by-state for child labor laws, until Congress finally outlawed the practice at the national level in 1938.<\/p>\n
That year, Hine applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. His proposed project was entitled \u201cOur Strength is Our People,\u201d from which the exhibition title is borrowed. His proposal stated:<\/p>\n
\u201cThis project should give us light on the kinds of strength we have to build upon as a nation. Much emphasis is being put upon the dangers inherent in our alien groups, our unassimilated or even partly Americanized citizens \u2013 criticism based upon insufficient knowledge. A corrective for this would be better facilities for seeing, and so understanding, what the facts are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inexplicably, the Guggenheim Foundation turned him down.<\/p>\n
Two years later, Hine, the epitome of the \u201cconcerned photographer,\u201d died penniless and on welfare, his beloved wife Sara dead of pneumonia, his house lost to foreclosure. But today, 80 years after his death, Hine\u2019s photographic achievement lives on, an unblinking composite portrait of America the melting pot, a country beset by grave injustices, yet always a beacon of hope.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our Strength Is Our People: The humanist photographs of Lewis Hine is on view till August 2 at the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. It is being traveled by art2art Circulating Exhibitions, www.art2art.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Archives \u2013 July 27, 2021 On view till August 2 at the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, North…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-565682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}