Untitled [Boys working in Brazos Valley Cotton Mills in West, Texas]

Lewis Wickes Hine was among the many artists who used photography to help enact social change. In the early twentieth century, Hine advocated using photographs as incontrovertible evidence for social welfare agencies’ reform campaigns. In 1908, he became the staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and spent the next decade traveling over 50,000 miles gathering “photographic proof” of child labor conditions throughout the United States. He is best known for his photographs of children working in factories, mines, and mills that were widely printed in pamphlets, magazines, books, slide lectures, and traveling exhibits. Hine’s photographs of child laborers varied from haunting individual portraits and candid scenes, to staged group shots, like this one, that better portrayed the large number of young people working at a given establishment. Throughout, Hine’s photographs establish a sense of empathy between the viewer and the subjects. Many of the photographs were accompanied by full details about the children pictured, their working conditions, and their wages.