Word: hine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Social Change. Hine, of course, believed more than that. To him the camera was an instrument of social change: it could shift the world's inequality a little. "I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected," Hine modestly remarked. "I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." This ambition arose quite early. Born in 1874 in Oshkosh, Wis., the son of a coffee vendor, Hine grew up working. "After grammar school in Wisconsin's 'Sawdust City,' " he recalled, "my education was transferred to the manual side of factory, store...
Technically, it was a demanding project. Amid the confusion, Hine accosted his subjects, lined them up, got them to look at the camera (an instrument not familiar in Italian villages or Russian hamlets in 1904) and ignited the magnesium flare. "It took all the resources of a hypnotist, a supersalesman and a ball pitcher," he said, "to prepare them to play the game and then to outguess them so most were not either wincing or shutting their eyes when the time came to shoot." The results rank among the greatest camera portraits ever taken, calmly relentless in their inspection...
That such factual and technically pure photography would be taken as "high art" 70 years ago was not to be expected. Hine did not care. As Alan Trachtenberg points out in his excellent catalogue essay, "Ellis Island represented the opening American act of one of the most remarkable dramas in all of history: the conversion of agricultural laborers, rural homemakers and traditional craftsmen into urban industrial workers." Hine, unlike other American photographers, perceived this and made it the lifelong theme of his work. The subject chose him. It presented Hine with a sense of historical duty, as witness...
...sentimentality there is none. Hine's subjects are not "noble workers," abstractions of a class seen from above. They are people living their lives, claiming the viewer's attention only by their irreducible concreteness. This was especially true of Mine's great polemical record-photographs - the work he did for the National Child Labor Committee after 1908. In the course of it, Hine traversed America, disguising himself and employing all sorts of subterfuges (his friends remembered him as a consummate role player) to get his camera into the factories, mills and mines where children worked. "I have...
Daring Calligraphy. Mine's work was not all indictment. It had its celebratory side as well, and this came to the fore in the 1920s. It took the form of a series of dramatically affirmative "work portraits," designed, as Hine un abashedly put it, for "social uplift," such as Powerhouse Mechanic, 1925. He hit the peak of this imagery in 1930, when he began to document that marvel of audacity and skill, the construction of the Empire State Building. As Trachtenberg remarks, Hine's Empire State series, with its daring calligraphy of girders and Icarian figures treading...