Lewis Hine. Building a Nation

Lewis Hine. Building a Nation brings together for the first time original works from the collection of the family Rosenblum of New York, the largest archival collection of vintage prints by Hine in private hands, here a group of 60 vintage print shows his best-known cycles: the famous workers of the Empire State Building, Ellis Island immigrants, from reportage of Pittsburgh, child labor in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia. The general public will be able to admire the skill and humanity of the father of "social photography" and connect to his experience some of the highest values ??of the next generation represented for example by the Photo League.
Lewis Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, carries within it a sense of awe and respect for the greatness of human nature that humanity has demonstrated the ability to defy the laws of physics, beyond the limits of space, time and of reason, even at the cost of sacrifice, hard work and suffering. Hine, a teacher and sociologist at Columbia University, so he decided to embrace the camera to better represent human greatness in the social conditions: his photograph built a nation.
Maybe you are fed up of images of child labor. Well we all are, says Hine, but we propose to make you and all over the country so uncomfortable in front of this thing, that when the time comes to action, images of child labor will only be a testimony of the past.
His images of people flying over the skyscrapers under construction (running the same risks to which they were subjected the workers to get the best angles, he settled in a special basket, created specifically for him, swinging more than three hundred feet above the Fifth Avenue), child labor and the endless views of the industrial districts became the means by which modern America promoted social reforms in the workplace.
In 1932 was published his first book entitled Men at Work: was an immediate success. 1936 is the year of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and if you ride the worker become a cog in the vast machine, one can not but think of the famous photograph of Hine 1920 of a micrometer to measure the mechanical transmission shaft is building.
Prominent feature in the exhibition will be a screening of the film America and Lewis Hine [60 '], Nina Rosenblum and Daniel Allentuck of Daedalus Production.
The exhibition, Admira, Milan, is produced and organized by Civita Tre Venezie and accompanied by the book catalog with essays by Editions Admira Mario Calabresi and Nicholas Leotta.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940), a professor of sociology at New York City at the Ethical Culture School and photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, is dedicated to telling the industrial activity of the iron and steel complex in Pittsburgh. During the First World War, documenting the work of rescue assistance and the International Red Cross in Europe. In 1930, he was commissioned to document the process of construction of the Empire State Building. Hine photographed the entire epic story of the building.
During the Great Depression, Hine worked again for the Red Cross relief work photographing the South of the United States affected by drought and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of East Tennessee. He also worked as chief photographer of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) who studied changes in industry and employment effects. His photographs and negatives are stored at the Library of Congress and the George Eastman House.

Nina Rosenblum is recognized in the United States among the most active authors of the independent investigative documentary and is increasingly known and loved in Italy thanks to a retrospective dedicated to her, curated by Manuela Fugenzi. Numerous awards have supported it in over thirty years as a documentary filmmaker and producer, including an Academy Award nomination in 1992. His films produced by Daedalus Productions Inc. was founded with Daniel V.Allentuck, are a valuable point reference of American democratic culture for their ability to combine with sensitivity and tenacity human testimony. Photography plays a role as leader, both as a prime source in the historical reconstruction is the protagonist of the story, a testimony to his contribution in the construction of the American Civil. His first film, America and Lewis Hine, gets immediate recognition (Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 1985). The title is borrowed from the book published by Aperture in 1977 as a result of the exhibition of Lewis Hine cared for by his father Walter Rosenblum, a leader of the photograph of the late twentieth century American social and active member of the Photo League, and his mother Naomi Rosenblum, author of the most famous important World History of Photography, published in 15 languages.

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