Product Details
Paperback
64 pages
Weatherspoon Art Gallery
Published 2002
Synopsis
"Priceless Children" includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the 19th century. Lewis Hine's pioneering documentation of immigration and child labour are compared and contrasted with the pictorialist work by six of his contemporaries: F. Holland Day, Gertrude Kusebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Clarence White. Hine's working-class children, portrayed for reform-minded audiences as victims of harshly inhumane conditions, often display a freedom, exuberance, sociability, and autonomy that their more priviledged and closely guarded peers might well have envied. Conversely, the bourgeois interior, in the iconography of fine-art photography, did not always or unambiguously register as a safe haven in a heartless world. This book suggests that establishing the value of the "priceless child", part of whose history can be seen in photographs, is an always-unfinished project.
About the Author
George Dimock is associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Other contributors include Tom Beck, Verna P. Curtis, and Patricia J. Fanning.
Book Description
Priceless Children includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the century. Lewis Hine's pioneering documentation of immigration and child labor are compared and contrasted with the Pictorialist work by six of his contemporaries: F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Clarence White.
Hine's working-class children, portrayed for reform-minded audiences as victims of harshly inhumane conditions, often display a freedom, exuberance, sociability, and autonomy that their more privileged and closely guarded peers might well have envied. Conversely, the bourgeois interior, in the iconography of fine-art photography, did not always or unambiguously register as a safe haven in a heartless world. This book suggests that establishing the value of the "priceless child," part of whose history can be seen in photographs, is an always-unfinished project. |
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