No child left behined

Lewis Hine

social reform photographer, worked for NCLC (National Child Labor Committee) and then later for government agencies that worked in concert with businesses in a capitalistic market, which portrayed the industrial worker as kind of a modern hero (they were often advertisements photographed by artists who were funded by the Works Progress Administration in the '20s and '30s for businesses to solicit employees. shaped a new labor business management model where the worker had greater independence and worked under better conditions. reform!).

Mornings on Maple Street is an awesome site run by this dude who just had an interest in uncovering the identities of the exploited child laborers in Hine's photographs (that he did for the NCLC). really interesting stories of who these children are, what they go on to do, and how he tracks down the people who knew them

"The real problem in America is not child labor, but child idleness. You cannot convince me that it hurts a child (age 4+) either physically or morally to make him work. Where one child has been injured from work, 10,000 have gone to the devil because of lack of occupation" -Charles S. Thomas, US Senator from Senator from Colorado from 1913 to 1921

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) (John Singer Sargent) - Girl at Spinning Machine, Cotton Mill (1908) >> notice how the tropes of the "Romantic" bourgeois child are being subverted in the modern child laborer, one existing ahistorically, and the other living in "industrial time" (Chinn). i'm making a stretch to connect this, but the converging diagonals place the vanishing point around the area of her head, similar to the placement of the vanishing point on Christ's head in Leonardo's famous The Last Supper, emphasizing her status as a martyr.

Men at Work series (1931)

Taking a Break High Above Manhattan - that famous photograph that (i think) was in my pediatric dentist's waiting room. "go see your family dentist if your child smokes or eats candy or something like that"
not like you couldn't tell from the pictures, but like the workers, Hine put himself in extremely dangerous situations to shoot. five died working on the Empire State Building.

re: ESB construction >> "Topping Out Day" was the day that the last steel beam was set in its place before the dressing of the empire state building, a very overlooked day in our history (May 1st)

for further reading, check out The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (JGAPE)