Men at Work, page 14
No known photographs show Lewis Hine at his job on the Empire State. Yet that has not prevented writers from detailing vivid impressions of Hine at the site. Beaumont Newhall, like many other writers on Hine, provided a gripping, you-are-there depiction of the scene in his 1938 profile: “With the workmen he toasted sandwiches over the forges that heat the rivets; he walked the girders at dizzying heights.” It makes for exciting reading. But how did Newhall know what Hine had done? Like every other description of the photographer at the Empire State, the stories come from Hine himself.
On November 25, 1930, just after completion of the steelwork on the building’s mooring mast, Hine wrote an excited letter to Paul Kellogg, his friend and editor of The Survey Graphic. “My six months of skyscraping have culminated in a few extra thrills and finally achieving a record of the Highest Up when I was pushed and pulled up onto the Peak of the Empire State, the highest point yet reached on a man-made structure,” Hine reports a little breathlessly. “Just before the high derrick was taken down, they swung me out in a box from the hundredth floor (a sheer drop of nearly a quarter mile) to get some shots of the tower. The Boss argued that it had never been done and could never be done again and that, anyway, it’s safer than a ride on a Pullman or a walk in the city streets, so he prevailed.” The experience was clearly exhilarating, and Hine felt his photographs taken in these moments had achieved something new. In his letter, he identified this new level of artistic achievement with the rise of the skyscraper itself. “Growing up with a building, this way, is like the account of the strong boy (was it Hercules?) who began lifting a calf each day and when they had both reached maturity he could shoulder the bull. I have always avoided dare-devil exploits and do not consider these experiences, with the cooperation the men have given me, as going quite that far, but they have given a new zest of high adventure and, perhaps, a different note in my interpretation of Industry.”
Four years later, in 1934, Hine wrote another description of his exploits at the building site in a letter published in Young Wings, the magazine of the Junior Literary Guild, an organization devoted to young readers. “Dear Friends,” he begins, “How would you like a year of ‘High adventure’, following the ins and outs, the ups and downs of a great Skyscraper as it grows gradually out of nothing into the greatest of human structures?” In the first part of the letter, while writing with compelling immediacy, Hine reproduces many of the clichés common to journalists of his era, enchanted with their own adventures in the rising structure.
It was a new problem for me,—this Empire State Building,—full of surprises and thrills,—of hard, exhausting climbs up long vertical ladders with a heavy camera on my back,—of perching way up on the tops of columns and even the very tip of the ‘mooring mast’ for special shots,—of balancing across empty space on a narrow beam guided by the hand of a friendly worker,—and, finally, swinging out on the high-derrick a quarter-of-a-mile above the street. Always there was the danger of a mis-step or one of a thousand careless acts (of yours or anothers)—that means a fatal fall. Stepping on a loose plank, I saved myself by a miracle,—tripping on ropes and wires,—burned by showers of sparks from the welder up above,—dodging the derrick-loads of planks and columns,—everything that one could do and emerge I am sure I have done.
All subsequent descriptions of Hine at the Empire State, from Beaumont Newhall’s on, derive from these letters, demonstrating how documentation is absorbed over time and amplified into legend.
Similarly, as we have seen, because Hine chose to suppress the identities of his subjects and instead to use their images to illustrate a more abstract ideal, critics have understood or construed the content of his photographs in equally general terms, as “work itself” or “American virtue manifested in the faces of American workers.” Like the impression of the photographer at work, this interpretation of Hine’s photographic practice, too, derives from Hine himself.
Hine had a very definite idea of himself as a photographer. “The ordinary way of viewing the newest and tallest building in the world is not the way of Lewis W. Hine, sociological photographer,” wrote Hester Donaldson Jenkins in her August 1931 profile, “Man and the Skyscraper.” Describing the Empire State project, she also reproduces many of the journalistic clichés of the era. “From these photographs, one can get a sense of the great adventure of this construction work, of the danger and thrill of a good deal of it, and of the virile quality of the workers.” Noting Hine’s history of work portraits, however, Jenkins understands that his goal extends beyond just showing individual workers. Hine is after something bigger, more abstract than any individual. On the job, she writes, “he immediately began to penetrate to the ‘spirit of the skyscraper.’”
From his first work portraits until the end of his career, Hine would use the grand language of “spirit” and “the human” to define his intentions. In 1921, he spoke of showing “the Human Side of The System.” In a February 17, 1933, letter to Florence Kellogg, wife of Arthur Kellogg and managing editor of The Survey Graphic, he writes, “It is for the sake of emphasis, not exaggeration, that I select the more pictorial personalities when I do the industrial portrait, for it is only in this way that I can illustrate my thesis that the human spirit is the big thing after all.” A month before his death in 1940, Hine summarized his lifelong practice with these words: “Ever—the Human Document to keep the present and future in touch with the past.”
Taking Hine at his word, writers and critics have understood his work as guided by a thesis, the illustration of a humanist ideal. Interpreting Hine, then, becomes a question of defining the ideal his photographs illustrate. Contesting Beaumont Newhall’s more aesthetic reading of Hine, historian Kate Sampsell-Willmann construes the photographer as a social critic and concludes, “Hine was not making art for art’s sake but for the sake of returning balance and harmony to social life being destroyed by the amoral demands of capitalism, which in turn resulted in immoral social relationships.”
In his own writings, and in the profiles published during his lifetime, Hine provided abundant material for this line of interpretation. In a 1926 interview with the magazine The Mentor, Hine offers this brief autobiographical sketch:
I came out of the Middle West a quarter of a century ago, after training to be a school teacher and after working also to express myself in various forms of art. My interest in the great movement of social uplift led me to throw myself into what was called ‘social work.’ For a number of years child labor and other lines of social welfare occupied my time, using the camera as a means of interpreting conditions and people to those who had but little contact with them. During the war the Red Cross activities in Europe were a fertile field for this kind of interpretation. My interest in the worker led me to spend a number of years interpreting his life and personality, and my collection of industrial situations stands as an apotheosis of labor. The philosophy that has guided me in my work is expressed in the words, “Whether it be an ornate stained-glass window, a gorgeous tapestry or a good piece of printing, a man’s handiwork is never better than the mind that conceives it and the hands that fashion it.”
Hine saw himself as a “sociological” photographer, an “interpretive” photographer, a photographer who conveyed ideas. If we follow his ideas to their intellectual roots, they emerge from some of the same sources as William Orr Ludlow’s craftsmanship movement. In a 1906 article in The Craftsman, Gustav Stickley’s magazine of the American Arts and Crafts movement, Hine already writes in the terms he would employ for the rest of his life. In that article, Hine expresses the mission of Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture School, where he had been a teacher since 1901. The goal of education, Hine writes, is “to associate the work of the hands with the work of the head in a way to make every child understand how head work and hand work are bound together.” In the pedagogical philosophy practiced at Ethical Culture, manual training was considered essential to a child’s complete development. Yet as Hine explains it in 1906, the goal of associating mind and hand extends far beyond any practical skills children might develop. “Every child who has gained respect for manual labor by working hard with his own hands in competition with other children and by studying at the same time the history of industrial art has learned the significance of hand work in the advancement of history, and is prepared to respect labor and laborers for the rest of his life.” In the ideals of the Ethical Culture School, respect for manual labor thus provided the foundation for a just and egalitarian society.
To separate manual training from the usual mental training would, in Professor Adler’s estimation, be creating class distinctions; it would be affording the embryo lawyer, the embryo musician, an opportunity to regard manual training as on a lower scale of business enterprise, and would also narrow the outlook of the artisan by shutting him away from the vital relation trade has to profession, industrial art to fine art, in the development of the world.
In theory, therefore, regardless of the child’s background or future role in society, this education would instill an ethic of equality and respect for work, leading students “to become good citizens, whether boys or girls; to become good workers, whether lawyers or carpenters; to become earnest home-makers and State builders, whether rich or poor.” This was Hine’s ideal of “good craftsmanship.” For the remainder of his life, he never strayed from this vision.
As Judith Mara Gutman observes, I believe rightly, “Hine always thought of himself as a teacher—teacher of children, teacher of adults, teacher of workers, teacher of corporations.” Hine’s mission of “interpreting conditions and people to those who had but little contact with them” may be understood as a fundamentally pedagogical goal. For him, to “interpret” meant to teach others how to see; to illuminate the life of an immigrant, a child laborer, or an industrial worker for an audience far removed from the realities of those lives; to make the “humanity” in that otherwise alien life evident and comprehensible. In his letter to Florence Kellogg from 1933, Hine wrote, “I think it is a very important offset to some misconceptions about industry. One is that many of our material assets, fabrics, photographs, motors, airplanes and whatnot ‘just happen,’ as the product of a bunch of impersonal machines under the direction, perhaps, of a few human robots. You and I may know that it isn’t so, but many are just plain ignorant of the sweat and service that go into all these products of the machine.” If Hine considered his audience “just plain ignorant,” this was not the ignorance of the uneducated. Precisely the opposite. Hine criticized the ignorance of the educated, the snobbery and blindness of class and position, which prevented those “above” from recognizing and respecting a shared humanity with those “below,” an ignorance that led the educated to feel falsely entitled to denigrate or characterize the lives and labor of others, whom they blithely considered automatons, “robots,” less than fully human.
Twenty years after his article about Ethical Culture, Hine would describe the goal of his work portraits in similar terms. In his interview with The Mentor from 1926, he says, “As I see it, the great problem of industry is to go a step beyond merely having the employer and employee ‘get along.’” Owners and laborers must be educated, Hine says, with each recognizing the role the other plays in the success of the enterprise. “Interpretive photography, properly used, will do that, I know, for it has been done. The great problem, of course, is to link the employer and employees in this method of education so that each sees the value in it.” Regarding depictions of the laborer’s craft, Hine writes, “The employer must think of it as genuine, not paternalistic; the employee must think of it as a sincere treatment of him and his work, not flattery.”
When successful, Hine’s sociological or interpretive photography would thus fulfill Felix Adler’s pedagogical ideal. It would make manifest the relationship of mutual dependence between employer and employee—between the “head” and the “hand” of labor. The educated-ignorant viewer, led by the photo to recognize the worker as a person, not a robot, would cease to look down on him. And the worker, sincerely recognized for his labor and craft, would feel himself respected as an equal partner, rather than denigrated as the member of an underclass. This leveling, Hine believed, would lead to a more democratic society.
Yet in his role as pedagogue, Hine can easily sound pedantic—can sound, in fact, like a member of the New York Building Congress’s Committee on Recognition of Craftsmanship, with the patronizing tone of a moralist instructing the worker how he ought to feel about himself. Unlike William Orr Ludlow, Hine did not see himself as a member of the “higher” strata of society. As a struggling, freelance photographer, he felt free to criticize the pretentions of those who assumed workers need only conform to their preferred ideal of behavior, and evil would be banished from the workplace. But Hine had his own ideal, and in expressing it, he can often display the same arrogance as Ludlow. In the 1926 interview, Hine sees his efforts tilted more toward educating the worker than the employer. “The employee must be induced to feel a pride in his work,” he says, and Hine’s means of “inducing” the worker to feel pride rings abrasively clinical. “I try to do with the camera what the writer does with words. People can be stirred to a realization of the values of life by writing. Unfortunately, many persons don’t comprehend good writing. On the other hand, a picture makes its appeal to everyone. Put into a picture an idea and, if properly used, it may be transferred to the brain of the worker.”
Hine—like Belle Moskowitz and William Orr Ludlow—was steeped in his generation’s discourse of “social uplift.” And as long as we only listen to what he says, then his commitment to “interpreting” workers lies open to the same criticisms as Ludlow’s attempts to “recognize” them. He may be criticized as romantic, utopian, class based, and patronizing.
This is how George Dimock characterizes Hine’s work. Hine’s career, Dimock writes, “moved from a photographic practice rooted in activist reform to a later, rather unsuccessful and naive celebration of the dignity of labour within the corporate mainstream.” Dimock does not comment specifically on the Empire State photos, since he considers them obvious evidence that Hine had sold out to corporate interests. His more pointed argument is that, even in his most socially engaged images, Hine is already an agent of oppressive social forces. Hine’s child labor images, Dimock asserts, “should not be used to enlist his photographs unproblematically on the side of an alternative, working-class history of child labour.” Instead, they “must be read carefully and cautiously ‘against the grain’ given their complicity in the construction of the working-class ‘other.’” To Dimock, Hine’s frontally posed subjects and their direct stares at the camera are not “evidence of Hine’s sensitivity toward and respect for those whom he photographed.” On the contrary, these poses are “a sign of the photographer’s class dominance vis-à-vis his subjects. Hine is free to pose them as he pleases, positioning them frontally as objectifications of his political project, the fight against child labor.”
Did Hine respect his subjects or use them? Were they subjects at all, or merely objects for him to shape according to his own ideals? Were they individuals or symbols? As I look through the portraits of the men who worked on the Empire State Building once again, I think the answer depends on whether you approach the images armed with concepts or look at them specifically as snapshots of discrete moments. In other words, what the photographs show, what they are, depends on whether you listen to what Hine said or look carefully at what he did.
To notice that many of his photos are posed does not delve very deeply into them. Hine’s Graflex camera was physically demanding. It took time to set up, and from the Ellis Island portraits in 1906, through Man with Wrench in 1921, to the Empire State’s workers in 1930, many of his finest photos show individuals frontally, looking at the camera, or posed at their work. The fact that Hine was composing the scene from behind the camera, while his subjects stood exposed in front of it, might in theoretical terms define a relationship of “dominance.” But this argument hardly distinguishes Hine from any other photographer of his class or era or any other. This is how photographs are made. These criticisms are conceptual. The critic abstracts the photographic situation from each individual photo and assumes a generic knowledge of what any subject or any photographer wants or feels. As such, these objections fail to address what makes Hine distinctive, what differentiates his images from those of any other photographer. Hine was not the only one to take images of child laborers, nor, for that matter, of construction workers on the Empire State Building. But his are the photos we continue to ponder, ninety or one hundred years later. As with the conceptual interpretations of the Empire State portraits, these criticisms treat the images as generalities. And by seeing generalities, the critic ignores the specific lives of the individuals pictured, even as he claims to defend them. This misses what makes Hine’s work important.
