Reading Lewis Hine's Photography of Child Street Labour, 1906–1918

Abstract

Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs are among the best-known social-documentary photographs ever taken, yet historians have neglected his photography of children working on the streets of America's cities. This paper explores the disputed symbolism of Hine's street-labour photographs. Far from simply depicting another appalling form of child labour, Hine's child street labourers, and the newsboys he photographed in particular, represented a range of ideas from masculinity and entrepreneurial spirit to the dangers of the new urban life and the apparent ignorance of immigrant parents. The symbolic newsboy was often far removed from the reality of child street labour, but he became an important figure in discourse surrounding the nature of childhood and the organization of public space in the United States of the early twentieth century. In exploring these subjects, this article takes on a neglected part of American history, yet an important one. Studying child street labourers reveals much about children, their choices, and the urban environment in the United States during the Progressive Era.

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