Priceless Children: American Photographs 1890-1925 : Child Labor and the Pictorialist Ideal

Priceless Children includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the century. Lewis Hine's pioneering documentation of immigration and child labor are compared and contrasted with the Pictorialist work by six of his contemporaries: F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Clarence White. Hine's working-class children, portrayed for reform-minded audiences as victims of harshly inhumane conditions, often display a freedom, exuberance, sociability, and autonomy that their more privileged and closely guarded peers might well have envied. Conversely, the bourgeois interior, in the iconography of fine-art photography, did not always or unambiguously register as a safe haven in a heartless world. This book suggests that establishing the value of the "priceless child," part of whose history can be seen in photographs, is an always-unfinished project.