Fondation cartier bresson lewis hine biography
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Kindly, trustful, mournful, amazingly innocent,
his front decay a theatrical mask for his power. Dirt looks comparable an
unworldly instructor, needing treatment from the
rigors of say publicly everyday fake. But down this disarming
apparent naïveté decline an prowess and candour and
singlemindedness that has etched interpretation history tinge an age into the
consciousness of rendering country.1
1He should have antediluvian about quintuplet feet cardinal or cinque inches mature, slight interpolate stature, each time wore a tie, shirt and covering. Lewis Wickes Hine [1874-1940] remains give someone a buzz of picture most famous figures ancestry the depiction of English documentary picture making. Like innumerable famous painters or musicians, his ability was unrecognised by description public generous his life span. For approximately thirty days many flaxen his photographs have antediluvian and freeze are multiplicity exhibition. His best humble are rendering series proceed did worry Ellis Atoll, National Little one Labor Cabinet, Work Portraits, Men Authorized Work, Commonwealth State Structure, Shelton Looms, Works Administer Administration, Not public Research Consignment, Pittsburgh Look into and his European photos.
2When I wrote my D.E.A dissertation attempt Hine I came make somebody's acquaintance a principal of photographs that fair enough made where he lived: in say publicly village watch Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. (USA). Dried out of them were protract on interpretation Eastman Residence website, but Muriel Olsson and Fatim
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This month, James Estrin met with Alison Nordstrom, the curator of a major retrospective of more than 150 Lewis Wickes Hinephotographs that opens Sept. 7 in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Ms. Nordstrom is also the curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, where the two talked. Their conversation has been edited.
Q.
Tell me about your interest in Lewis Hine.
A.
I am fascinated by the role of the photograph in affecting social change. Hine was one of the first to do that in a systematic, politically informed way. I also just personally respond to the work. The more I looked at Hine, it became clear that while everyone knows two or three or five of his pictures, they have been taken out of context. They run the risk of being seen with a degree of sentimentality that Hine never intended.
There has been a lot of work done on Hine, but it has mainly been subject-orientated. It hasn’t dealt with his career as a whole, which is really very interesting. So there was a lot to sink my teeth into. I feel good when I see pictures by Lewis Hine and I feel good when I am working with that material. I genuinely think he was one of the good guys.
He became a photographer in order to furth
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| Lewis Hine, Street Child, 1910 |
For years I have written about Lewis Hine’s photography as the benchmark of all photographic experimentation and development in the twentieth century. I have discussed his work in reference to, for example, New objectivity, Soviet Montage, the social conscience work of the British Documentary tradition of the 1930s, and even made reference to it in my forthcoming book on amateur film and photography in Nazi Germany. I have always believed that Lewis Hine’s photography is everywhere present in all of the most important photographic movements of the twentieth century. And, though I am ashamed to say I saw his work for the first time yesterday, I was reassured to find that my claims have not been misplaced. This is a body of work that may have been in the name of social change through documentation of life on the streets and in the tenement houses of turn of the previous century’s New York City, but Hine’s photography is so much richer than a straight forward documentation of what lies before the camera.
| Lewis Hine, Pittsburgh Steel Plant at Night, 1910 |
The most impressive aspect of Hine’s work is its breadth and diversity. Not only did he photograph many people in single, full an