Lewis Hine, Russian steel workers, Homestead, Pa., 1908
[see large image]

Lewis Hine took many of his most famous photographs while working for social reform agencies, such as New York’s Charity Organization Society and the National Child Labor Committee. (The Charity Organization Society began in 1896 and the National Child Labor Committee was organized in 1904, just two of many reform organizations during the Progressive era that advocated for the amelioration of poverty, improvements to working conditions, and the end of child labor.) The reform goals of these organizations had a direct bearing on Hine’s work. In 1908 he spent three months taking photographs for the Pittsburgh Survey, a pioneering investigation of working and health conditions in that steel-producing center. Hine’s photographs illustrated the multi-volume report that caused a sensation in reform circles. In a manner similar to his photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island and child workers, Hine's Pittsburgh Survey pictures addressed the sympathies of viewers who would come across them in the pages of reform publications. Subjects such as the Russian steelworkers captured by Hine in 1908 were depicted without the wariness, the underlying fear, that characterized many of Jacob Riis's photographs of the urban poor. On the contrary, the immigrant workers in Hine’s photographs were portrayed as worthy of viewers’ sympathy, exploited and yet still dignified, deserving candidates for U.S. citizenship.

Arthur Rothstein, Negroes, descendants of former slaves of the
Pettway Plantation, Gees Bend, Alabama, 1937
[see large image]

While reformers used documentary photography to illustrate the goals of reform movements, photographs could also illustrate the biases and racist assumptions of private and government aid agencies. Arthur Rothstein took the photograph above in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the spring of 1937. Rothstein’s employer, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), had been providing assistance to this community of African-American sharecroppers for more than two years by the time the young government photographer arrived. Nevertheless, Rothstein was instructed to photograph the community as if there had been no such assistance granted—to capture its so-called primitive condition and thus elicit support for the kind of federal aid that the FSA was providing to rural farmers.

Rothstein was told that the families at Gee’s Bend lived on an old plantation, abandoned by white owners three decades earlier. Isolated from the surrounding society, Gee’s Bend appeared to the government as a throwback to tribal society in Africa. The community was marked by a high rate of out-of-wedlock births, Rothstein was told, and the large, sprawling families lived in rude shacks that they erected themselves made of sticks and mud. The photograph above is typical of the more than fifty images Rothstein recorded during his visit. The caption for the image says that this is a single-family group. That caption implies that the sole male figure in the picture has fathered all of the children present. Both the pose and the caption stand at odds with normal FSA practice of showing small white families, lest the presence of many children put off viewers rather than enlist their sympathy.

Rothstein showed no such restraint in his photographs or his captions. In a number of captions he spoke of large families of Negroes at Gees Bend, Alabama, referring to them as “Descendants of slaves of the Pettway plantation. They are still living very primitively on the plantation.” To further emphasize how the former plantation had fallen into ruin, Rothstein took the following picture of the Pettway mansion which he wrote was now “occupied by Negroes.”

Arthur Rothstein, Home of the Pettways, now inhabited by Negroes.
At Gees Bend, Alabama, 1937
[see large image]

Stripped of their didactic captions, Rothstein’s images provide visual clues suggesting that the African-American residents of Gee’s Bend lived not in a primitive society but in an economically depressed condition similar to that of white sharecroppers in the rural South. Far from proving that the hamlet’s occupants were unable to care for themselves, the images demonstrate a high level of competence and self-sufficiency. The notched log timbers of these buildings provided ample proof of the artisanal skill of the residents. As for his courtyard picture, Rothstein neglected to identify his main subject as the village elder who stood proudly before his extended family. The man was a grandfather and great grandfather, and this is a multigenerational portrait. The fathers of the children do not appear in the picture, either because Rothstein excluded them or because they were working at the time the photo was taken.

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Jacob Riis­a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant­exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890. He also presented slide shows to reform-minded, middle-class audiences.

Examine four of the photographs that Riis used to accompany a lecture that he delivered (probably in 1894) to the Washington Convention of Christians at Work. The lecture was titled “The Other Half and How They Live; A Story in Pictures.” Next look at the photos alongside the words that Riis used when presenting them. (The text excerpts are from a transcript of the lecture published in the January 1895, issue of The Temple Builder, a magazine for Christian reformers.)