“These photos ended child labor in the US” — Vox, 2019, 6:35 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddiOJLuu2mo

Sociologist Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) helped expose the cruelty of child labor with visual research methods. Interestingly, photography and sociology were formalized at the same time (roughly 1839) when Louis Daguerre publicly debuted his Daguerreotype image and Auguste Comte began publishing a series of texts on positivism. In addition to a shared birthday, Douglas Harper argues both were children of the industrial revolution, with photography being “a new way of seeing” and sociology being “a new lens of interpretation” (1988:55). Sociologists like Lewis Hine were pioneers in what we now consider visual research methods. Hine even wrote a book on social photography and hoped the camera could help elicit empathy when written words could not.

As a pieces of data, what do you think are the advantages and limitations of photographs? How might visual methods be used to document social problems today? What distinguishes research photography from other styles of photography (e.g., journalism)?

From the video’s description: Child labor was widely practiced until a photographer showed the public what it looked like. The 1900 US Federal Census revealed that 1.75 million children under the age of 16, more than one in five, were gainfully employed. They worked all over the country in cotton mills, glass blowing factories, sardine canneries, farms, and even coal mines. In an effort to expose this exploitation of children, the National Child Labor Committee hired a photographer to travel around the country and investigate and report on the labor conditions of children. Lewis Wickes Hine photographed and interviewed kids, some as young as 4 years old, and published his findings in various Progressive magazines and newspapers. Once the public saw the plight of these children, state legislatures were pressured to pass bills regulating labor for workers under the age of 18, effectively bringing an end to child labor in the United States.

You can see more of Lewis Hine’s photographs here: https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-child-labor-committee/about-this-collection/