Lewis Hine captured three teenage mill workers staring back at him in a November 913 shot taken in Kosciusko, Mississippi. They stopped and were arranged in front of him, their black stockings holding them firmly in place. They had come from the area near the mill. Their history is that route that lies behind them. However, the road also appears to represent their future in an odd way. The route plummets away from them, signifying both their past and future lives. If that’s the case, the three girls’ imagined futures are not the same. The main girl is framed against the workers’ house behind her, raising her left hand to her face in a manner reminiscent of a Bouguereau peasant.
The girl on the left, who is framed by the same home as the central girl, is similar to the girl in the center. She is wearing a smeared gray smock and has her hands behind her back. This household relationship between one of the row of workers’ cottages, or millproperties, and what may be a battered and permanently weathered stagnation in this one area, foretells their destiny, if you will. Naturally, this doesn’t address the question of who these females were in reality at this time—not even Joe Manning is certain of that—but rather the photographer’s interpretation of them based on his Wells-like horoscope.
And there’s the female to the right of him. She has a distinct relationship with the road. She emerges against the distant, more mirage-like structures, unframed by the nearby home. She stands apart from the other girls by having a wider space between them. She also appears more at ease with her hipshot pose and slight tilt to the right. Her hair is loose around her forehead and ears, and she smiles charismatically at the photographer. Compared to the other two girls, she seems less structured and guarded during the photo shoot.
She looks to be the person the image most “creates,” that is, most instantly conjures, standing against the road, as tall as the trees obscuring the sky above her, as though her solidity were as apparitional as the nowhere she possesses. It’s where some of the teenage laborers at Kosciusko came to light and where she will undoubtedly vanish forever. The soulmaker’s power to make this girl disappear is as great as his gift of life, which is why there is horror in this place. The instant she is conceived, she is rushed into nothingness.
Hine’s use of roadways and railroad tracks to place the kids makes the futurity impact almost too strong and evident. His December 1908 shot of John Roberts was taken in Dillon, South Carolina, and shows the little child in front of two train lines that are moving at a fast speed. Roberts occupies the vanishing point, as though the contemplative expression on his face represented more than simply the awkward situation of being photographed by this kind stranger. These are the etched patterns of his doomed songs, maybe recorded long prior to his birth. The ad claims that the illnesses and other tragedies that await juvenile laborers may just as easily be Roberts’s hardscrabble surroundings, along with illiteracy, moral perils, early old age, and early death. The rails, which govern all routes, extend as far back as they can and also accelerate ahead.
The youngster feels as though he is being held back by the rails in a flat, omniscient world that determines his fate and sets the accelerated course of his life, much like the folded wings of a massive industrial bird that fan its steel skeleton and rest in its ability to go across space. Perhaps at this point, the socialist message becomes almost too explicit and formal. However, the effect is unknown when the background blurs more ambiguously. Eugene Bell is shown in Hine’s November 1908 photo of him in Gastonia, North Carolina, stiffly posed with his fingers twitching anxiously in batwing shapes—possibly clutching a cigarette in his right hand. The young trees and the wooden worker home behind him spook melancholically.
Indeed, this is his residence. Indeed, he will be working. Information is so abundant. However, Hine’s attention on Bell causes the backdrop to blur into an evocative mist that he surely could not have imagined as a mystery effect in images of this nature. It all comes down to thickness and width.
Bell’s slender waif of a physique becomes thick with his vibrant presence. The dark ovals of his cuffs, the creases in his slacks, the sliver of darkness behind his collar, and the big lips are just a few of the substantial details that make him appealing. Concurrently, the background becomes thinner, disappearing like smoke from a genie’s bottle. The child in effigy is the thin, leafless tree behind him. The hazy echoes or premonitions of his person are sprung by the other trees. The tree and the hut closer to him on the left are in an intermediate zone of thickness, softer than the boy’s but still substantial, with the shack’s roof missing the depth of the boy’s chapeau.