Lewis wickes hine

Lewis Hine was born in 1874 in Wisconsin and was a well know american documentary photographer who focused on the social issues of the time, such as child labour. in 1908 Hine became a photographer for the national child labour committee, and over the next decade he documented the lives of the children who work unethical hours in some of the most dangerous and extreme conditions for a small amount of money. his understanding and perspective put a completely different image in peoples heads when they saw the images of the labourers. He achieved this by capturing the workers at a time they were working very hard. Hines work was often very dangerous, he had been threatened by police and owners of the place of work. at the time Child labour was a thing that was hidden from the public and photography and Hine in particular exposed the hell out of the industry and the big businesses, and this work got him in extreme trouble with the press and authorities. The way Hine gained access was by acting as someone with authority too, he acted as a Fire inspector, post card vendor, Bible salesmen and he also said he was a photographer who kept record of the factory’s machines and architecture. I really admire this work as it was a factor in the change of law  to do with how young you could be to work. Even though this work was made a long time ago it has given me many ideas to photograph around Gloucester docks, the people working and living down there, because it looks like a quite industrial area and i’d love to get some images like this that really set the scene of industrial work and maybe see why they got children to do this type of labour. also the buildings at Gloucester docks were built late 1800’s and were most likely used for child labour before the Great War. After looking at these images i’ve noticed that there is a lot of ambient light filling the frame and the use of a flash would be very minimal, he may have used a flash on the last image of the man holding the wrench but he had a very good consideration of the position of natural light and composed his pictures around it. ​