American Photographs Abroad: Traveling with Lewis Hine

Abstract

Steps away from an Amsterdam canal, a photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940) rests between layers of thick matboard in a secure box (fig. 1). Hine made the picture in a Richmond, Virginia, street in June 1911, partially angled toward an intersection. A small, pale boy stands in the center of the frame, leaning toward the street (fig. 2). The boy’s face is scrunched up against the raking light. One of his hands grips a fire hydrant while the other clutches a newspaper. His bare feet balance, one in front of the other, on the curb. This photograph also includes partial views of a streetcar and various passersby: a group of three Black women in hats, shirtsleeves, and dark skirts, pictured mid-stride and mid-conversation, and two white men in suits moving past. The boy is the only figure standing still in a photograph that has itself moved continents: from the Richmond summer heat to the permanent collection of Rijksmuseum, where its meaning was transformed via an error of cataloguing. This photograph has been reproduced as Newspaper Vendor, New York, 1909 throughout its life in the Dutch museum. The discovery of this commonplace cataloging error helped me contextualize Hine's photographs of child labor in the history of photography and theorizations of race in the United States and the Netherlands, allowing me to explore how race shaped Hine’s goals and the reception of the photograph. The situation raises questions about the enduring impact of racial hierarchy in Hine’s child labor photographs, as well as the role of whiteness in the formation of “American” photography more broadly. Fig. 1. Photograph RP-F-2007-326 as stored in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June 2021. Photo by author