Similarities Between Hine And Jacob Riis

The names Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis have now become synonymous with the instigation of urban reform efforts. The two are regarded as pioneers in eradicating the problems on which they focused; Hine’s being child labour and Riis’s tenement housing. When questioning whether writing and images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inform us of ‘solutions’ to the aforementioned issues, I would conclude that an adequate answer cannot be formulated without reference to their work. For my visual source, I will be analysing a Lewis Hine image, captured on November 8th 1908, it’s caption reads, ‘Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high, has worked half a year’. For my written source, I will be focusing on Jacob Riis’s most famous contribution,
When penning the text, Riis ‘employed every means he could muster to arouse his readers: curiosity, humour, shock, fear, guilt and faith’ . The text concerns itself with ‘the sea of a mighty population’, a population that is overrun with immigrants living in an ‘unsanitary, economic and spiritual wasteland’ . It is not presumptuous to consider that Riis’s proposal of reforms for the ‘Other Half’ were propelled by his own experiences as a homeless, unemployed Danish immigrant reliant on charitable housing. Although his experiences would seemingly suppose a sympathetic approach to his subjects, Rather, the racial characterizations of ‘the godless Chinese, the penurious Jew, and the dirty Italian’ were regarded as ‘evidence of his knowledge of the slums, not of his prejudices’ . The late 19th century context in which Riis wrote is evidenced in that his prose is absent of the objectivity and detachment that generally mark journalistic explorations of poverty
Whilst clearly older than Sadie, she too could be a child worker. Was Hine attempting to further press the matter that Sadie was just one child amongst many? Or, could she be an adult? If we are to follow the latter interpretation, the image can provoke a greater sense of urgency. To Hine, child labour harmed children, but it also harmed society ‘by not preparing the next generation to be productive members’ . If the subject in the foreground is an older woman, her inclusion may have been a stark reminder that should reform not be made imminently, another generation will be lost to a life of tedious labour