Smithsonian American Art Museum Photography Collection Feature

Lewis Hine photographed tenement life and factory conditions in New York in the early years of this century

Hine organized photographic excursions through New York's commercial and tenement areas in order to heighten awareness of the world around them. By 1904 he had begun to photograph immigrants, the poor, and the exploited as a means of studying and describing the social conditions faced by these people. He is best known, however, for his systematic and comprehensive documentation of child workers for the National Child Labor Committee. Hine spoke about his work on extensive lecture tours, and his photographs were widely disseminated through newspapers, socially concerned publications, and posters.

Many of Hine's photographs of children, such as this image of a girl at the door of an orphanage, describe the relationship between an individual and an institution. Here, Hine calls our attention to the austere space beyond the child, emphasizing the extent to which her home already seems like a factory. The title given to the photograph—possibly when it was included in a portfolio of Hine's work organized by the New York Photo League in the late 1940s—refers to the Dickensian comic-strip character "Little Orphan Annie," created in 1924, who was forced to labor for her keep at an orphanage.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Lewis W. Hine (1874–1940), Orphan in Doorway: a Child Laborer in a Mill,about 1910, printed later, silver print, 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.