- Title Information
- Title
- The Narrative Document: Lewis Hine and 'Social Photography'
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Quick, Kathy Anne
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2010
- Physical Description
- Extent
- x, 150 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Doane, Mary Ann
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nickel, Douglas
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Kriz, Dian
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. History of Art and Architecture
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- Lewis Hine employed a variety of narrative strategies to create a persuasive and moving 'social photography' in the early twentieth century. Despite the longstanding supposition within the history of photography that the categories of documentary and narrative are incompatible, this investigation looks at how Hine cultivated, rather than suppressed narrative in his documentary work. Documentary has often been associated with unmanipulated authenticity and with the unmediated transcription of reality. Unlike the concept of narrative which is virtually inseparable from that of fiction, documentary is tied to a belief in the camera's ability to present empirical evidence or facts. The idea of storytelling itself would seem to undermine the documentary goal of an unmediated presentation of fact, and yet, it was Hine who coined the term "photo story" to describe his work. This study examines how Hine constructed pictorial narratives by adopting a number of cinematic devices. In many of the photographs that he produced for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Hine utilized a melodramatic mode of narration. Melodrama offered not only a means through which he could tell the story of child labor, but it was also a means through which he could attempt to 'move' his viewer emotionally. For Hine, the most effective images were the ones that tugged at the viewer's heartstrings and aroused sympathy for his subject. This study looks at how narrative functions in both the internal composition of the image and the viewer's apprehension of the image. This study also looks at how Hine moved his viewer visually and conceptually through space in his photographic series by using the editing techniques of early filmmakers. Although photographic and cinematic histories have emphasized photography's effect on film, Hine reverses this tendency. This investigation provides a critical and long overdue analysis of the narrative aspects of Hine's work and the impact of film on his documentary photography.
- Subject
- Topic
- documentary
- Subject
- Topic
- narrative
- Subject
- Topic
- Lewis Hine
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1061714")
- Topic
- Photography
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20111003
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0Z899N5
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations