In Photos: Celebrating the Work of Lewis Hine

Derrick and workers on girder, Empire State Building, 1930-31

In Hine’s vertiginous series of photos of the Empire State Building’s construction, he shot men performing perilous tasks perched on beams and hanging from wires. Times’ art critic Ken Johnson once wrote the photographs reflect Hine’s ‘romantic belief in the possibilities of America’

Noon hour in East Side factory district, New York, 1912

Hine’s work centralizing child workers was part and parcel of the progressive ideology of the era, which joined, among others, social workers, labour leaders, suffragists, and teachers in the hopes of bringing about meaningful reform