The Dark Side of the American Dream: The Children of Ellis Island

He was one of the groundbreakers who ascertained that art is the perfect tool to change reality. Child labor, emigration and the terrible living conditions of the working class in the United States at the start of the 20th century were the motif and constant source of inspiration for Lewis Hine (Wisconsin, 1874-New York, 1940), American photographer and pioneer of the social documentary. The Mapfre Foundation is dedicating a retrospective to the artist, with 170 images of his work, which can be seen at its headquarters in Madrid beginning tomorrow.

A teacher and sociologist by profession, photography was not Hine’s original vocation. He wanted to change the world and was looking for evidence to back up his case. With a group of students, he immersed himself in the lives of children at the turn of the last century. The setting was Ellis Island, the center of immigrant disembarkation in Manhattan.

There Hine photographed the landing of ships loaded with exhausted European families who had escaped hunger and famine in their homelands. There were men and women with bewildered gazes, groups of Italians sitting on their knapsacks in anticipation of the new world, women halfway between sleep and wakefulness and children, many children, with grease marks on their faces and infinite sadness in their expressions. These first images convinced him of photography’s power to influence public opinion. From that moment on, he never put down his camera.

He captured their arrival and tried to follow them to the spaces in which they crowded together, where they ate and where they worked. He aimed to vilify American rejection of their strange customs and their large families with women endlessly pregnant and overwhelmed with children, as well as the recrimination they were subject to for not speaking the language. It is a pattern of behavior that, as curator Alison Nordstrom recalls, we as developed nations have repeated in response to the arrival of immigrants from the Third World.

Child labor in the United States, between 1903 and 1913, was Hine’s second important series, a subject on which he would never give up. He photographed numerous boys and girls with adult demeanors, working 14 hour days: in factories, as delivery boys, shining shoes or laying down bowling pins so that others could play. Instead of going to school, they were hired for the most grueling jobs for less money than the adults and, just the same, they suffered accidents that left them without arms or legs and cursed for life to beg on the streets. By means of his photos, Lewis Hine fought for and achieved great progress in improving the lives of immigrants and eradicating child sweatshops.

At the end of World War I, Hine traveled to Europe where, escorted by the American Red Cross, he was able to track the greatest victims of war: children.

The construction of the Empire State Building in New York (1930-1931) gave him the opportunity to condemn the dangerous conditions to which the construction workers were subjected. There were men who appeared to fly between cranes, others who braced themselves against falling rubble or withstood the wind, trowels in hand.

Lewis Hine was just beginning to live off his photography when he died of a post-operative complication in a New York hospital. He had received royalties from Life and Fortune, but they were not enough to save him from eviction. He died poor and alone, without knowing that he would someday become the godfather of documentary photography.