A Picture is Worth a Thousand Votes
One of the fictions about photography is that they are representationsof the truth. This was only ever partly true - even in the days before theadvent of digital photography when what you see is most certainly not whatis out there in the real world. But even a hundred years before theinvention of digital photography, there was always a gap between thephotograph and the world. There is always an editorial stance, a decisionmade on the part of the photographer about what to include and what toexclude, about how to frame an image, about where to show up with a camerato begin with. This does not mean that the photographer - or the photograph- lies (although sometimes this is the case), but rather that photographsput forward one perspective over others. Sometimes this perspective serves(or can be made to serve) a certain political purpose. For example, one ofthe most famous photographs of the 20th century, that of a young Vietnamesegirl running in terror and pain from her napalmed village taken by aphotographer for the Associated Press, was both true and a powerfulpolitical weapon for those calling for a withdrawal of American forces fromSoutheast Asia. This paper examines the work of two photograp
Hine's focus was narrower than wasRiis's. While Riis had focused his camera on the faces and lives ofimmigrants who had few defenses against established (and often corrupt)economic and political forces, Hine documented how in a single generationthose new Americans had - through their own fierce desires for a betterlife, the basic mechanisms of democracy and tremendous hard work - beenable to transform themselves into a social force to be reckoned with. It is to go on faster than ever, now that the continent is filled up by the first superficial layer of population over its whole extent and the intensification of industry has begun. Hine makes us angry less oftenthan did Riis, but his era was one in which there was less to be angryabout. The photographs taken by Lewis Hine, also a lifelong social activistas well as a well-known photographer in his own time, are also convincingcultural (and political) statements. Hine was working at a time when many of the worst conditions faced byimmigrants had been ameliorated (at least to some degree), in no smallmeasure because the immigrants and their children whom had beenphotographed by Riis had become citizens and been given that most powerfulfranchise, the vote. A photograph of his like "Knee-pants at forty-five cents adozen" (which appears in perhaps his most important work, "How the OtherHalf Lives") demonstrates with implacable clarity the stresses inherentboth in the kinds of piecework that so many immigrants found to be theironly choice for employment when they came to the United States. Riis's goal was to present his viewers with images from whichthey could not turn away easily, that would sear and hurt and anger. The great inventions both make the intention of the organization possible and make it inevitable, with all of its consequences, whatever they may be. As a social reformer, he joined forces with Teddy Roosevelt, who atthe time was serving as the police commissioner for New York City, andhelped to introduce parks into the city's most crowded neighborhoods andplaygrounds at the schools of immigrant children - seemingly small stepsthat made a substantial difference in the lives of those who had beenliving without the sight of a flower or the suggestion of birdsong. Hine was fascinated by the ordinary worker, and his 1932"Men at Work" was a celebration of the workers who built the Empire StateBuilding. As aphotographer, he captured shots of tenement life (often by using flashphotography, becoming one of the first journalists to do so) that made theliving conditions of immigrants impossible to ignore by those whoseancestors had come to the United States a few generations earlier. Riis was interested in portraying the entire immigrant experience,one in which the hopes for life in the New World were immediately dilutedby a shortage of decent housing and the difficulty of finding work that wasanything but close to slavery. However, reformers like Riis were not in fact content to let thoseconsequences "whatever they might be" simply play out.
Common topics in this essay:
Empire Building,
,
Social Settlements,
York City,
Half Lives,
Effort World,
August Riss,
Riis's Riis,
Progressive Movement,
Lewis Hine,
consequences whatever,
immigrant children,
child labor,
growing power,
digital photography,
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Acceptance Essays
