In the first decade of the century, photographs were beginning to enter into many aspects
of American life. They came through the mail. Pictures appeared
in newspapers and magazines. Photography was starting to have an influence not only on
how people saw the world, but on what they believed.
Writers had been describing the sufferings of the poor since before the time of Dickens,
but no one thought of using photographs to advocate social change. Soon after it became
possible to print photographs in books, Jacob Riis included pictures in his influential
work on housing reform.
What Riis needs is a bright, portable light source.
Throughout the 1800s, photographers try all sorts of ways to
light their photos. A breakthrough comes with a metal called magnesium.
In 1887, two pyromaniacs from Germany grind up the magnesium and add it to gunpowder.
This produces an explosive solution. They call it flashlight powder.
Riis takes this previously invisible group of people and makes them visible on a mass
scale. It sets in motion a dramatic change in public opinion, triggering one of the great
movements of social reform in American history.
Riis' s work inspired Lewis Hine, a teacher who first picked up a
camera as an educational tool. In 1906, he was hired by the National
Child Labor Committee. They hoped that photographs might lend powerful support to their campaign
to make child labor illegal. Hine's purpose was to show that children who
worked so hard would be used up, would not provide America with an intelligent working
class. Hine assembled his pictures into exhibitions and slide shows, which crisscrossed the country.
His photographs reached a huge audience, people who had never seen these kinds of images before.
They were both moved and outraged.
"Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures," Hine wrote.
"Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to
make you and the whole country
so sick and tired of the whole business that, when the time for action comes, child labor
pictures will be records of the past." Lewis Hine is probably one of the first people
who realizes that what you see in a photographic image has extraordinary power, and it's got
power way beyond logic and way beyond language. The photographs and the campaign led to state
and ultimately federal legislation outlawing child labor. Hine had made photography an
essential tool in the struggle for social change.