This month, James Estrin met with Alison Nordstrom, the curator of a major retrospective of more than 150 Lewis Wickes Hine photographs that opens Sept. 7 in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Ms. Nordstrom is also the curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, where the two talked. Their conversation has been edited.

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Tell me about your interest in Lewis Hine.

I am fascinated by the role of the photograph in affecting social change. Hine was one of the first to do that in a systematic, politically informed way. I also just personally respond to the work. The more I looked at Hine, it became clear that while everyone knows two or three or five of his pictures, they have been taken out of context. They run the risk of being seen with a degree of sentimentality that Hine never intended.

There has been a lot of work done on Hine, but it has mainly been subject-orientated. It hasn’t dealt with his career as a whole, which is really very interesting. So there was a lot to sink my teeth into. I feel good when I see pictures by Lewis Hine and I feel good when I am working with that material. I genuinely think he was one of the good guys.

He became a photographer in order to further his political and social ends. It was only very, very late in his career that he began to understand himself as an artist and it was only very late in his career that the arts establishments paid any attention to him at all. Hine was not discovered truly until the 1930s. He was famous in the teens and ’20s, but not in art circles.

Eastman House has the contents of his house at the time of his death — negatives, prints, publications and correspondence. Because we have so much of the material, not just the greatest hits or just one element of the career, it seemed possible to do something comprehensive.

You came to Eastman House attracted by the Lewis Hine collection. What did you discover when you delved into his work?

There was a much greater variety of work than most of us know. In his child labor work, most of us are familiar with the kids in the coal mine and the wan little girl standing in the mill. When he was working on child labor for the National Child Labor Committee, he covered 50,000 miles a year. He went as far west as Chicago and to Florida. It was fascinating to see how comprehensive he was.

Since our material is vintage material, there are sometimes these amazing annotations on the backs of these prints. I often say the back of a photo can tell you more than the front. In that period, he is really gathering evidence, and so the notations have the name of the child and the height of the child. He measured the height of his buttons on his vest. He always wore a suit and tie to the ground so that he could ascertain the heights of these little children by measuring them against the buttons on his jacket.

Obviously the employers of these children were not too pleased with a muckraking journalist visiting these factories. In many cases, he would sneak his way in. He was a skilled amateur actor and he would often pretend to be something other than he what he was.

There were photographs that surprised me. But what came to me from looking hard at him was a sense of a real personality, the sense of a real human being — almost a Horatio Alger character himself.

How so?

He was from the Midwest. He was poor and hard-working. His father died when he was a teenager and he ended up being the sole support for his mother before he got an education. He had a lot of different jobs. He sold things door-to-door. He actually worked in a factory briefly, a furniture factory in Wisconsin.

He fell under the influence of a strong mentor, Frank Manny, who recognized him as a bright, promising boy and encouraged him to get an education. When Manny was hired as the head of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, he brought the young Lewis Hine with him to teach. He asked him to take up photography so that the activities of the school could be documented.

There is evidence that it was Frank Manny who said, “Let’s go to Ellis Island and photograph immigrants.” I find it fascinating that the rhetoric around immigration in 1900 is so familiar to us today. It was: “These people aren’t like us. They don’t speak English, they have different customs and religions, and they’re going to destroy the fabric of America.”

Hine was a genuine progressive. His letters are full of puns and wordplay and clever jokes. You get a sense of a clever guy who comes to the big city and feels his way. He put a human face on these people in a way that really made a difference. I think in doing that, he realized that photography would let him further his efforts for social change. He became a freelance photographer in 1910 but always considered himself an educator — someone who used photography and wasn’t in a classroom.

What did you find out that you didn’t expect?

Hine went to Europe at the very end of the First World War for the American Red Cross. He was there to document the efforts of Red Cross workers with refugees across Europe, but especially in Croatia, Bosnia, northern Greece, Macedonia and France.

You get this sense of a still-youngish man who is delighted by these new places. He is taking a lot of photographs that don’t tell you anything about the Red Cross. They tell you about an old lady with a great face holding a baby pig [Slide 13]. There is this sense of delight and wonder about being in a new culture. I see that as a real turning point for him.

Before his experience in Europe, his work mostly focuses on the negative: it’s child labor, it’s slum housing. He said, “I had to show the things that needed to be changed and I had to show the things that needed to be celebrated.” But until this trip to Europe, he focused on the things that needed to be changed.

When he comes back, he is definitely a changed person. The work becomes much more focused on positive aspects of labor. He is not opposed to labor. He thinks labor is enriching and the thing that connects us to the planet. He is opposed to child labor because he thinks it strips them of their natural childish gifts and enthusiasm and turns them into oxen too early.

The work he does after his World War I experience is really a celebration of labor, the powerhouse mechanic, the building of the Empire State Building , candy makers, wig makers, linotype operators. In a way, he reminds me of Walt Whitman. Hine was interested in everything and his work is enthusiastically encyclopedic in the way that Whitman’s poetry is. And very American.

And Hine started thinking of himself as more as an artist?

There are photographs that are very romantic and pictorialist. He was certainly aware of painting and he talked about the influence of a Raphael Madonna on some of his “Madonna of the Tenement” pictures. It’s later, with “Men at Work,” that it seems quite clear — both from his writing and the work itself — that he is beginning to think of himself as a modernist artist.

One of the things that made him quite different from photographers of the time is that he insisted on a byline. He referred to his own photographs as “Hineographs” and expressed that they were different from other kinds of photographs. He insisted on keeping his negatives and he was basically attempting to use them as stock. He is a really interesting character.

He always had to make a living and he wasn’t very good at it. He died in poverty with his house foreclosed on and taking food from welfare. It’s really a very sad story.

Toward the end of his life, many of his concerns had been addressed. He was successful in bringing attention to a lot of these problems — and, as you said, the world had changed. There was less child labor.

I would argue that what we have done in America is we’ve moved our child labor to Vietnam. But that’s another story entirely.

The world did change. Some of his photographs were used to persuade legislators to pass new laws. The milieu that Hine comes out of was called “social work” at the time but it was morphing into what we would now call “sociology.” In the 19th century, philanthropy had this kind of Lady Bountiful aspect to it — reaching a hand down to the poor; the worthy poor. Widows and orphans.

What changed around the time of the last century was the idea that social ills could be scientifically studied and that if you document these social ills, if you shone a light on them, they would go away. Now it can seem like a sad, pathetic belief.

One of the characteristics of Hine’s work is that he’s not seeing his subjects as victims. I just think he cared about people. We are taught you have to be very cautious about trying to infer the feelings of either the photographer or the subject by looking at an image. They can mislead. But I have looked at a lot of Lewis Hine photographs and I think he cares deeply and respectfully for the people he photographs. He says that at the end of the day, it’s about the people. He doesn’t mean the people, in a Marxist class sense; he means individual humans. And that’s something we can respond to.

What did you want to do with this exhibit?

I wanted to do justice to the man. I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest exhibition of Lewis Hine photographs that’s ever been held. 213 objects and 179 photographs, and I think that’s necessary to show the breadth and depth of this image maker. The other thing we do is show a lot of ancillary material, trying to give context so people can recognize that the act of looking at a photograph in 1910 is different from looking at a photograph now.

One of my objectives has been to link us more directly with the international photographic community. This show is done by Eastman House in collaboration with the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris; the Mapfre Foundation and its exhibition space in Madrid; and Nederlands Fotomuseum, which is the National Museum of Photography in Rotterdam.

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