Priceless Children: American Photographs, 1890-1925

Le livre

Priceless Children includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the 19th century. Lewis Hines 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. Hines 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.