childlabor

These Photos Ended Child Labor in the US

Photographs have the power to bring issues to the forefront of public consciousness and spark change in society. Here's a 6.5-minute video by Vox that tells the story of how photographer Lewis Wickes Hine helped end child labor in the United States.

Colorized Photos of American Child Laborers

Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine once said: "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

Project Combines Photos of Abandoned Mills with Lewis Hine’s Photos of the Kids Who Worked There

North Carolina-based photographer Tammy Cantrell has been shooting abandoned mills in the Gaston County area for years, but her Not an Exit exhibit/series reveals a part of those mills that no Urbex photo on its own ever will.

By combining her images with Lewis Hine's documentary photographs of child labor, she allows the past to peek out through her photographs and whisper of a harsher time in our history.

Lewis Hine’s Photography and The End of Child Labor in the United States

It's hard to imagine it, but in the early 1900s, child labor was still extremely common in the United States. All across the nation children would spend their days slaving away in mines and cotton mills, far away from the school rooms that the National Child Labor Committee wanted them to be in.

The NCLC had been trying to put a stop to child labor since it was founded in 1904, but statistics weren't having the effect they had hoped. So, in 1908, they decided to enlist the help of Lewis Hine and his camera to get their message out.