HINE LEWIS W (1874 1940) Empire State Building two workers i

Sale 2135 - Lot 122

Price Realized: $ 6,125

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000

HINE, LEWIS W. (1874-1940)
Empire State Building, two workers inspecting the steel structure. Silver print (partially hand-colored), 4 3/4x3 3/4 inches (12.0x9.5 cm.). Circa 1930

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Additional Details

Freddy Langer: Lewis W. Hine, The Empire State Building (New York & London: Prestel, 1998), 67.

Lewis Wickes Hine was the first American photographer to recognize and develop the social documentary idiom. A mid-westerner by birth, he began his career in New York City during the Progressive era working with leading social reformers to address issues relating to immigrants, child laborers, and tenement home-workers. Hine's innovative use of photographs and text, and his insistence on controlling their graphic presentation in social welfare journals, popular magazines, and illustrated books position him as one of America's premier photojournalists.

The cynosure of Hine's work is his series depicting the construction of the Empire State Building, which was completed in 1931. A dangerous assignment, Hine balanced on high girders hundreds of feet above the street to make his dramatic bird's-eye pictures. This project resulted in short-lived public acclaim, and a photographically illustrated book (which he designed) entitled Men at Work. Subsequently, after years of being ignored by his colleagues, Berenice Abbott and her partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, "rediscovered" the aging photographer and curated a retrospective of his work at New York's Riverside Museum, which opened in 1939. He died the following year.