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Lewis Hine

"...in the early 1900s, child labor was still extremely common in the United States." article here

I remember being overwhelmed by this photograph when I first came across it over three decades ago, and nothing's changed looking at it now.  Hind showed what photography was capable of.  It became his tool of choice in a campaign for social change.  In those split seconds of exposure time while gathering evidence needed in the fight for reform there was simultaneously a more personal kind of acknowledgment. The lasting importance of Hine's photographs comes not from his choice to make visible those human beings whose place at the very lowest rung of society meant they were almost invisible, but from his astonishing connection with people, as individuals. Photographer and photographed are long gone, and yet the image remains,  a record of a gaze shared, a moment that still holds the power to carefully unfold us all.