The Humanitarian Lens

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The New York Sun

Approaches to contemporary photography run the gamut from gritty slice-oflife snapshots to artful, light-caressed compositions. This diversity, however, is nothing new — a point driven home by Keith de Lellis Gallery’s inspired pairing of two photographers active in the first decades of the 20th century. Doris Ulmann (1882–1934) and Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940) both pursued photography as a means of advancing social causes, but their prints show very different temperaments.

Hine, a university-trained sociologist, took up a camera at age 30 as a teaching aid. A project to photograph immigrants at Ellis Island convinced him of the medium’s potential to shape public attitudes, and he devoted himse lf to recording the conditions of the working poor. As the official photographer for the National Child Labor Committee between 1911 and 1916, he documented the desperate working conditions in factories, mines, and canneries in Southern and Eastern states.At some sites, Hines had to pose as a Bible or insurance salesman to gain access.

His images at de Lellis, all smaller than 8 inches by 10 inches, are gelatin silver prints — a process that, because of its crisp results and convenience, is still the standard for black-andwhite photography. His 16 prints make their point with poignant efficiency. “Rome, Georgia Hosiery Mills” (1911) portrays a group of youths and young men standing informally outside their mill; the grim, fatigued stares (and the bare feet of the youngest, who might be 14) are particularly affecting.Other prints depict workers dwarfed by seemingly endless rows of immense machines, groups of newsboys selling papers, and entire families bent over their tenement dining room tables crafting garters and artificial flowers. Some titles make the message explicit; “A Six-Year-Old Italian Boy Taking Home Work” (1912) pictures a child shouldering a large bundle of fabric.

The selection doesn’t include some of Hine’s best-known prints. There are none of his later images of the construction of the Empire State Building, for example, or the images of child laborers that tug hardest at the heartstrings: the ones of lone young girls with hard, vacant expressions standing between huge ranks of machinery; or of fish cutters as young as 7 with bandaged hands. The selection here emphasizes instead Hine’s subtle but rigorous compositions. Despite their unself-conscious efficiency, his images are tightly balanced dramas of light and dark. In “Newsies Selling Jersey City” (1909), the newspapers held aloft by four youths form a striking array of white sails against nighttime tones. The evocative atmosphere in “Tenement Homework” (c. 1912), in fact, with its rich tones and sparkling of flower petals on a patterned tablecloth, momentarily distracts one from the plight of the family of workers.

Doris Ulmann attended the Ethical Culture School in New York in the early 1900s when Hine taught there, but her work reflects the more painterly, pictorialist style of her teacher Clarence H. White. She, too, used photography to press humanitarian causes, documenting the lifestyle and crafts of rural communities in the southern Appalachians and the South Carolina shore.Accompanied by the musician and folklorist John Jacob Niles, who appears in several of the prints at de Lellis, she made annual trips south between 1928 and 1934 to record these vanishing traditions.

She preferred what was then considered an old-fashioned process, the platinum print. This required more cumbersome equipment but allowed particularly rich tones on matte paper. In her 6-inch-by-8-inch prints, a soft-focus technique imparts a wonderfully atmospheric intimacy to her subjects’ weather- and care-worn countenances.

The photographer’s reverence for the simple dignity of his subjects suffuses these 40-odd images. Whether cleaning fish, hoeing a field, or holding a prayer book, the figures seem utterly at home in their own bodies. (The seeming timelessness of their gestures may be related to the relatively lengthy exposure times.) In one print — undated and untitled, like many here — sunlight catches just the brim of the hat of an elderly, shaggy man gripping a scythe. The weight of light is tangible, seeming to bounce endlessly about every shadowy mid-tone of his clothing and the barn wall behind. In another photograph, a man sits on his shadowed porch; through an open door, the velvety darks of the interior stretch behind, broken only by the soft light of a far window crisply framing his hat. As in many images here, the luxuriant mid-tones turn midday into a kind of lucid twilight.

The almost nostalgic tone of these prints seem to honor, finally, a way of life rather than particular individuals, making one wonder about the photographer, who, wealthy but frail in body, spent most of her days in the very different world of New York City. Ulmann’s work intriguingly balances two worlds: the Romanticism of her teacher White and the more businesslike approach of Hine and younger social documentarians like Dorothea Lange.The difficulty in categorizing her work, as well as her relatively short life span, may account for its fading from public attention soon after her death.

Hine lived long enough to see new labor laws spurred, in part, by his wrenching images — and also to witness a decline in interest for his work. Commissions became scarce in his final years, and he died in poverty. Today, however, the work of both Hines and Ulmann is very much alive at de Lellis, illuminating in remarkably different fashion the lives of the neglected.

Until September 23 (47 E. 68th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-327-1482). Prices: $800–$14,500.


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