In Photos: Celebrating the Work of Lewis Hine

One of many children working in Carolina cotton mills, 1908

In 1908, Hine was commissioned by the National Child Labour Committee to begin documenting young workers across the country. At the time, children were regularly employed on family farms, but Hine’s photographs brought attention to their work as miners, mill workers, and oyster shuckers, and eventually helped lead to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938

Italian family in the baggage room, Ellis Island, 1905

Hine is often called a ‘social photographer’, and when he worked at the Ethical Culture School in New York City one of his assignments was to document immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. He hoped the work would make viewers have ‘the same regard for contemporary immigrants as they have for pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock