The cover of the summer 2021 issue of Fine Books Magazine features my story on Lewis Hine and his photographs of American labor, particularly child labor in the early 1900s. The story is available in print:
Hine spent 16 years traveling throughout the country, to the sardine canneries in Maine where children cut fish with sharp knives, the coal mines in West Virginia where they crawled into tight spaces to light explosives, and the cotton mills in South Carolina where they worked on colossal cotton-spinning machinery. He portrayed the children there with empathy but also objectivity as he wanted to be “double-sure that my photo data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any kind.” That way no one could deny what they were seeing.