Lewis Hine Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

DATE: 1/17/2012 | BY CORY REYNOLDS

D.A.P.'s stunning new monograph on the work of early twentieth century photographer Lewis Hine was reviewed this weekend in The Wall Street Journal. Please scroll down to read the complete text.

"For Lewis Hine, photography was both craft and calling. Trained as a teacher and social worker, Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera in 1904 so that he could offer photography classes at his school. Soon he was advertising his services in the field of 'Social Photography,' with a specialty in 'graphic representations of conditions and methods of work.' Commissions from the National Child Labor Committee produced some of his most haunting images: photographs of newsies, including one sleeping with papers for a pillow; a crowd of boy miners whose ghostly faces barely break the enveloping coal dust; a 5-year-old Mississippi shrimp picker. These images and more than 150 others are assembled in the handsome survey Lewis Hine (D.A.P., 261 pages, $65) and capture Hine's belief in the essential nobility of labor. He dubbed his works 'Hineographs,' proud of their rhetorical power and graphic distinction, which he developed more self-consciously in later photographs, such as those in 'Men at Work' (1932). Reproduced here in facsimile, that book celebrates riveters and girder-wranglers, including the men (like the one above) who toiled atop the Empire State Building. Elsewhere, a worker's form, framed by the circle of bolts he is tightening, recalls the geometric perfection of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man."

--The Editors, The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, January 14, 2012