"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera." - Lewis Hine

"The Mill: Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and to put back the empty bobbins."

When I think of childhood, I think of dolls, of trampolines and bikes, I think of dancing, playing, running, smiling, laughing - until the sun goes down. And then it starts all over. If you would ask anyone who grew up in the early 1900's to think of their childhood, you would receive radically different answers: work, poverty, famine, danger, responsibility, caution, exhaust - until the sun goes down. And then it starts all over.

Lewis Hine started out as a school teacher who learned how to use a camera as an aide in his classroom. He soon become interested in child labor, and the way these kids were being treated. He left his teaching career and travelled all over the east coast sneaking into factories, fields, and sea ports. Hine often had to play the part of a "plumbing inspector" or find another such way to weasel himself into these places, and secretly get the shots he needed to prove to America that this was wrong.

Families were going through such poverty that they had no other choice than to send their children out at the crack of dawn to work until the sun had set. They received very little for their work and were subject to very dangerous conditions. Somebody had to help.

Lewis Hine was able to radically change the way America felt about children working. Most of America did not know what was going on in these places, and it took one man to publish his photography and get the ball rolling into all of the laws we have in place today.