Lewis Hine & The Empire State Building
Taught by Lauren Cesiro
Lauren is a native New Yorker who recently earned her M.A in Art History. She's Adjunct Faculty at Fairfield University and the School of Mahanaim where she teaches classes such as History of Photography, A Black Experience, and Art History: Prehistoric - Contemporary. When she’s not reading about photography, you can find her stalking various bakeries for the best rainbow cookie, watching tv shows & movies about time travel, and gathering together (A.K.A. obsessing over) her favorite images on Pinterest.
Before there were superheroes, there was Lewis Hine (1874-1940). With his portraits of children working in unsafe factories and anxious immigrants at Ellis Island, he exposed injustices and aimed to inspire the American public to action.
Absent, though, from his oeuvre are photographs of skyscrapers, cityscapes, and/or architecture. Why then would the Public Relations Department for Empire State Building, INC select Lewis Hine as their chief photographer in 1930? More importantly, why would he accept this vapid and mainstream commission?
Our class will grapple with these questions by discussing a variety of Hine’s images. We will mostly focus on his photos of the construction of the Empire State Building. Observing his penchant for experimentation with new camera angles, movement, and composition, conventions he had not used before this assignment, we’ll learn how Hine’s style changed because of this fateful commission.
We’ll also talk about the importance of this project to the everyday people during the Great Depression (which began only a month before construction started on the building,) as well as some history about the Empire State Building itself including the capitalists and industrialists, John Raskob and Pierre du Pont, the function over form architects, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and central to the story, the hard-working “skyboys,” or the tradesmen.
Many art historians overlook this project because it doesn’t fit into the neat social documentary box created for Hine. I hope you’ll leave our class with an appreciation for Hine’s heroic labors during this project and an understanding of why this body of work is crucial to Hine’s history as well as American history.
