Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor – On Display at the Siege Museum Through June 27
The traveling exhibition Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade against Child Labor is on display at Petersburg’s Siege Museum through June 27, 2009. Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine was hired in 1906 by the National Child Labor Committee to document the harsh working conditions of children in the United States. He spent the next […]
The traveling exhibition Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade against Child Labor is on display at Petersburg’s Siege Museum through June 27, 2009.
Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine was hired in 1906 by the National Child Labor Committee to document the harsh working conditions of children in the United States. He spent the next ten years photographing children in canneries, coal mines, cotton mills, farms, and sweatshops throughout the country. The fifty-five black and white images by Hine included in the exhibit reveal the appalling circumstances that poor, working-class children endured until legislation against child labor prevailed.
The exhibition is organized by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York. The Eastman House contains nearly 10,000 of Hine’s original photographs, negatives, and artifacts. A separate display includes photographs taken by Hines during his June 1911 visit to Virginia. These images from the Library of Congress document child laborers in Petersburg cotton mills and cigarette factories, newsboys hawking newspapers on the streets of Richmond, and living conditions in the mill village of Matoaca.
The Siege Museum is located at 15 W. Bank Street in Old Towne Petersburg. Admission is $5.00 with discounts to children, students, and seniors. Admission is free to Petersburg residents. The exhibition will also be open with free admission on the evenings of May 8 and June 12 for Friday for the Arts! For additional information call (804) 733-2427 or email petgcurator@earthlink.net.
-
Recommend this
on Facebook -
Report an error
-
Subscribe to our
Weekly Digest
This article has been closed to further comments.