Pennsylvania coal breakers (breaker boys), 1912

Breaker boys would separate impurities from coal by hand. ‘There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work,’ said Lewis Hine

Powerhouse mechanic, circa 1921

In one of Hine’s most famous images, he emphasizes machinery and musculature. ‘The visual appeal of the photo is rather direct and stunning,’ Daile Kaplan, vice-president of photographs at Swann galleries, told The Hot Bid. ‘It has harmony, it has visual balance, and at the same time, he positions the worker in a way that he’s controlling the machine. It reflects a new visual vocabulary that addresses the machine age, but it privileges the person with the machine’

Derrick and workers on girder, Empire State Building, 1930-31

In Hine’s vertiginous series of photos of the Empire State Building’s construction, he shot men performing perilous tasks perched on beams and hanging from wires. Times’ art critic Ken Johnson once wrote the photographs reflect Hine’s ‘romantic belief in the possibilities of America’

Noon hour in East Side factory district, New York, 1912

Hine’s work centralizing child workers was part and parcel of the progressive ideology of the era, which joined, among others, social workers, labour leaders, suffragists, and teachers in the hopes of bringing about meaningful reform

One of many children working in Carolina cotton mills, 1908

In 1908, Hine was commissioned by the National Child Labour Committee to begin documenting young workers across the country. At the time, children were regularly employed on family farms, but Hine’s photographs brought attention to their work as miners, mill workers, and oyster shuckers, and eventually helped lead to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938

Italian family in the baggage room, Ellis Island, 1905

Hine is often called a ‘social photographer’, and when he worked at the Ethical Culture School in New York City one of his assignments was to document immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. He hoped the work would make viewers have ‘the same regard for contemporary immigrants as they have for pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock’

Italian family on the ferry boat landing at Ellis Island, 1905

Hine photographed immigrants at Ellis Island from 1904 to 1909, taking some 200 photographs in all. The work has drawn comparisons to that of Jacob Riis, the Danish-American social photographer and journalist who chronicled the lives of impoverished people on New York City’s Lower East Side.

Mother and child, Ellis Island (Italian Madonna), circa 1907

Hine’s Ellis Island photographs are often praised for maintaining the integrity of his subjects, shooting them as individuals without exoticizing their pilgrimage

Slavic immigrant at Ellis Island, 1907

Hine’s Ellis Island images were shot with a Graflex camera. He often had to overcome language barriers in the process of locating his subjects, finding an isolated place to shoot them, and setting the pose

Climbing into America (Ellis Island group), 1908

In Climbing into America, Slavic immigrants assemble on a flight of stairs carrying all that they’d brought with them to the United States. Each figure in the photograph, looking weary and breathless, has in hand a white sheet of paper, likely a registration form of some sort

Hot day on East Side, New York, circa 1908

The Hine works being auctioned at Swann Galleries come from the personal collection of Isador Sy Seidman, a friend of Hine’s and a lifelong collector of New York City-centric photographs

Patriarch at Ellis Island, 1905

‘Though Ellis Island was not a new subject for journalism and pictorial representation, Hine’s approach and motivation may have been new,’ wrote Maren Strange of Hine’s social documentary photography, revealing the ways Hine’s work exemplifies the spirit of early 20th-century migration