Art & Architecture

Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine

A personal reassessment of Lewis Hine's iconic, haunting photos of child workers in the early twentieth century

Hardcover

Price:
$48.00/£40.00
ISBN:
Published:
Mar 29, 2016
2016
Pages:
200
Size:
8.5 x 9.5 in.
Illus:
114 color + 10 b/w illus.
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Between 1908 and 1917, the American photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine (1874–1940) took some of the most memorable pictures of child workers ever made. Traveling around the United States while working for the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed children in textile mills, coal mines, and factories from Vermont and Massachusetts to Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Using his camera as a tool of social activism, Hine had a major influence on the development of documentary photography. But many of his pictures transcend their original purpose. Concentrating on these photographs, Alexander Nemerov reveals the special eeriness of Hine’s beautiful and disturbing work as never before. Richly illustrated, the book also includes arresting contemporary photographs by Jason Francisco of the places Hine documented.

Soulmaker is a striking new meditation on Hine’s photographs. It explores how Hine’s children lived in time, even how they might continue to live for all time. Thinking about what the mill would be like after he was gone, after the children were gone, Hine intuited what lives and dies in the second a photograph is made. His photographs seek the beauty, fragility, and terror of moments on earth.


Awards and Recognition

  • Finalist for the 2016 Marfield Prize, The National Award for Arts Writing, Arts Club of Washington