Opening paragraphs from: Photographer as Advocate: Lewis Hine’s America
Odds are that when you close your eyes and imagine the huddled masses at Ellis Island, or brawny men at derricks hoisting iron bars to the top of the Empire State Building, you are seeing images that Lewis Hine introduced into the popular imagination. His photographs have become a crucial part of our national memory of the years between the turn of the century and World War II.
But Hine’s is not an objective record; his work was originally used as propaganda, albeit of a beneficent variety. Beleaguered immigrants, soot-faced miners, heroic mechanists, children who lost fingers in factories — the images, paired with reported exposés in progressive magazines and newspapers, were designed to chime chords of empathy within contemporaneous viewers so as to rouse them to action. These pictures were advocacy foremost, and art second.
“There are two things I wanted to do,” Hine once said. “I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.”
Whole article here:
http://hyperallergic.com/98778/photographer-as-advocate-lewis-hines-america/
