Lewis Hine The Mill Analysis

Photography is the art that captures moments in history which store more than a thousand feelings and memories. Due to the second industrial revolution, many positive such as more jobs, opportunities, and a better standard of life took place in society. However, aspects like injustice and child labor came to the scene as well. Men and women were subjected to hard and incessant labor, and kids were put to work as well. Due to this type of injustices, the social reform movement started. The reform wanted the government to create protective laws against exploitative labor in factories. The American sociologist Lewis Hine was a strong activist of this movement and was the pioneer to what we now call ‘documentary photography.’ In his documentary photographies, Hine mostly captured the reality in which kids lived inside the factories. Furthermore, in his captions of child labor, Lewis focused to depict how small kids were compared with the machinery they handled. His caption ‘The Mill,’ taken in 1909, was not the exception to his technique. Here Lewis documented how small these kids were that they had “to climb up on the spinning frame to mend the broken threads and put back the empty bobbins.” His technique was to capture the scene from a standpoint where people

He documented the poverty in which people lived, as well as the injustice of employers in the factories. The employers demanded so much from their employees, and they paid them less than a minimum wage. The social reformist Lewis Hine wanted to bring to light the unfairness in manual labor; he exemplified how people from all ages worked, and sadly how their effort did not pay off to get them out of poverty. Lewis Hine was successful to use his art to bring social ills to public