Lewis Hine took up photography at the Ethical Culture School, learned that lesson well. His Whitnel spinner, not to mention other young girls he photographed toiling at their machines in the Carolinas in 1908 steps out of folklore. We can all but imagine the evil stepmother and stepsisters lurking in the wings, or out having fun, while the drudge in her dirty dress labors the day long, her case all the more piteous for how beautiful she is. The photograph becomes a supercondensed story, “a single flash of light,” the fairy tale crystallized to a moral truth, the unfairness of being cooped up, deprived of even the doves that would alight on one’s shoulders.
The instant of the Whitnel spinner photograph is “Once upon a time,” but it is also outside of time. The moment unfolds to tell a story, a fable, though it is not clear what the moral is. The long row of bobbins, yes, is some nightmare version of the enchanted avenues down which a dreaming princess might stroll. In Hine’s picture there is an overabundance of pumpkins and not enough carriages. Everything is constantly turning back to, and never changing back from, the pure drudgery of slops and mops that beautiful slippers were supposed to redeem.
If a strong feeling is identifiable in the photograph of the Whitnel spinner, it belongs to the emotion-world of these fables, where right is right and wrong is wrong, but the look on the girl’s face is again so difficult to know. To fix her as sad, as in a pitiful state, as Hine’s humanist admirers have long done with so many of his pictures, is to arrest the photograph’s exquisitely fluid invention of momentariness.
That moment is nameless, like the little girl. Hine did not bother to record what her name was. This is not to say that her name is not now known. In 2008 a man named Joe Manning not long after starting a passionate quest to learn the identities of the children in Hine’s photographs discovered that the Whitnel spinner was named Cora Lee Griffin, that she was born on July 12, 1896, and that the 1920 census lists her still as a spinner at the mill and married with two children. She died on June 3, 1985, age eighty-eight, survived by “two sons, three daughters, eight grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, one brother and one sister.”
Manning’s research is extraordinary, his motivations earnest. He has now discovered the identities and life stories of many of Hine’s subjects, using pragmatic deduction and simple methods such as asking newspaper editors in the towns in which Hine photographed to post the pictures he made there. That is how he found out who Cora Lee Griffin was. Manning’s way of repatriating Hine’s photographs with descendants who often had no idea that their grandmother or grandfather or other relative had been photographed at so young an age has made him a humble guest of honor at family reunions where the Hine photograph he has solved has become nearly a sacred icon. As well it might. As well it should.
But Manning’s methods and focused passion seem at odds with Hine’s way of working. Sometimes in his captions Hine names the child correctly, other times he gets the name wrong, and still other times (as at Whitnel) he gets no name at all. But often something that cannot be identified hovers at the scene of these photographs. Looking at them is like going into a field to search for coins with a metal detector only after carefully disabling the metal detector beforehand removing the batteries or bashing the metal-finding disc against a rock. Anything so that the device won’t work. The aim is to make one’s ignorance like that of the person within the moment herself.
The Whitnel spinner may or may not read socialists such as Spargo and Hine himself focused on rates of literacy and illiteracy among child workers but what is clear is that, within the photograph, she cannot decipher the moment in any way. Wide-eyed, she is blind to how she appears, the knob-headed cane I’ve imagined that she holds a figure for that blindness, that feeling of feeling-of-one’s-way. Fingers on the coarse ledge that is the look of a moment when beheld from within. The wide eyes betoken their mutual burst of notseeing.
The eyes are merely the starting point for all that they, at this moment, can never know: the future Manning has discovered for her, the husband, the children, the old age, the lineage of descendants who will recollect her. That dizzying array of times is not absent in the photograph implicit futurities are part of what makes a photograph such as this so eerie, even terrifying but, again, she cannot know any of this. Blind, feeling her way, holding her cane (even that is not there), she and the man taking her picture do not know each other and will never encounter each other again. Somewhere out there one of Munch’s puberty-stricken vampires is the Whitnel spinner’s cousin.
The likeness does not concern puberty and adolescence but a kind of staring vulnerability. Each girl is given an existential awareness: being alive, being in time, emotions changeable in the moment. Fredric Jameson, writing of the sense of time in realist literature, describes “a temporality specific to affect … in which each infinitesimal moment differentiates itself from the last by a modification of tone and an increase or diminution of intensity.” Different from the old emotional registers, where sadness to anger to joy might all be portrayed on a fixed chart, affect flows on “a sliding scale of the incremental,” changing even as we look. Like the dark wing of gauzy shadow behind her, moods pass across Munch’s girl in temporary patterns.