The photographer looks at the Whitnel spinner in astonishment and says nothing. The touchstones for an encounter between a stranger and photographer are uncertainty, tentativeness, and fumbling ecstasy. These moments will prompt a confession, a soulful revelation “out of the depths,” a fleeting connection you could say, that is wordless, and can only be made possible by Hine’s haunting tenderness in approaching the task. The scene that emerges is so real that it takes over the lengthy line of equipment and the tired span of industrial time, until the expansive view itself takes on the boundless extension of a mystical moment, just as Anderson and his kin Hine had imagined it. Anderson, according to Kazin, “saw life as a dream, and he and his characters seemed to be walking along its corridors all the time.” Hine’s lack of experience makes it all feasible.
When the social workers first informed him he wasn’t trained enough in social work to visit the mills and industries and take pictures of kid laborers, they understood exactly what they were talking about. The unschooled way Hine entered a town and a factory he did not know, and photographed people he did not know—all with the knowledge that he would be leaving quickly, that he would never see any of these places again—is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his photographs.
However, all of this had to be done quickly since any more waiting, postponing, or careful thought than what the circumstances demanded would negate the urgency of his images. It was a catastrophic display of diligence. When one’s business was the fleeting meeting itself, one had no place for the mills, which had started to emerge in the South around 1880 as a component of a progressive new economy providing regular work to the region’s impoverished White population. Hine’s images seem to lack significance as the several waves of mill history celebrate the new southern entrepreneurs, criticize the same individuals, and then delve into the finer points of the life of mill workers. It is also irrelevant to have some knowledge of the intricate ethnic displacements that occur in the new millennium economy.
Hine had no business defending the mills against the criticisms of southern apologists like Alexander McElway of the National Child Labor Committee, who in 1907 said that “the depreciation 14 of our racial stock has already begun” and that Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, in his three-day Senate floor speech against child labor in 1907, bitterly emphasized that the victims of the country’s current labor laws were “white children, 6 and 7 years of age.” If his touch was to be light and authentic to the time, he could not afford to display anything as heavy as thoughts, whether they were his own or someone else’s.
The real significance of their “once upon a time” is the dream that theirs is no time, another time, a flicker of affect, reams of social history and attitude condensed to the flare of a fable, a dream, a moment so true it could hardly be real. Yes, his photographs trail a vast sociological story, one that permits people to understandably to this day to misread his pictures as documents. The baseball coach for Sherwood Anderson cries, “Now! Now! Now! Now!” during the game, but nobody can understand him—not even his own players. Even if Hine meant to say contrary, he looked for the exact time when this is the most difficult to express.
Even the points that the assiduously observant Hine himself meant to express were drowned out by the present, which had such a royal force in his work. These current sentiments and exhortations were somehow defeated by the mere process of creating the image, which was laden with differing assumptions regarding labor history, racial relations, and public policy. Each really fleeting image therefore came to represent a strange break from the times rather than so much a statement of them. It was just quickness. Both north and south, this was true. Hine may have puzzled somewhere about how his limited interactions with his subjects affected his photographs and how that briefness affected him. Take into consideration this photo of Addie Card, which was shot in August 1910 in North Pownal, Vermont, which is near Bennington, Vermont, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the Vermont-Massachusetts boundary.
The girl is standing with her right arm hanging down, slack. Her soiled smock slouches to the left in its one pocket. The strands of white fuzz from. The spools adhere to her front as if she had strolled through a web of spiders. Her right arm is dangling, and its fingers curl, while her left arm, which is resting on the row of spindles, seems to be stunted, resembling a twig with its hand cupped and fingers spread. Joe Manning discovered that this girl, who lived to reach ninety-four, matched the thinness of the cylindrical bobbins arranged behind her on each arm. It’s not for nothing that Hine’s detractors recognized children’s pleading emotional appeal.
The delicate limbs, the pocket stitched onto her right hip like to a reattached kangaroo pouch by an unskilled surgeon—she is an asymmetrical virgin, her crippled thinness growing to an imploring demand on the observer. She is a machine of emotions, churning with emotional intensity, a saint in chains, a girl visionary, with a beautiful glance as polished as the gleaming spindles. We see the image. But what happened when she and Hine faced off against one another?
In what ways does the picture detach their meeting from everyday life, as well as from resolves with emotive value and societal significance? The feeling of Hine’s transient muse is brought out by a New England contrast. Cornish, New Hampshire, is about a hundred miles from North Pownal. Maxfield Parrish, a well-known artist and illustrator, was contemporaneous with Hine and resided there with his wife and kids at The Oaks, a specially constructed estate home. A teenage girl called Susan Lewin began working there as a nanny in 1905. Lewin, who was born in 1889, finished high school at the local Quechee High School until she was fourteen, at which point she started working for a living.
Lewin was requested to pose for the photos that Parrish used as the inspiration for his paintings not long after she started working at The Oaks. They fell in love quickly, though it’s unclear when, and remained close until Parrish passed away, which was maybe sixty years later.