Lewis Hine at the Singer works: the child-labor camera in South Bend

1908 or 1914 — the caption card and its neighbors disagree

The most famous camera ever pointed at this city: Lewis Wickes Hine, the National Child Labor Committee's investigator-photographer, worked in South Bend at the Singer Manufacturing Company — the sewing-machine cabinet works that was then among the city's largest employers. The Library of Congress holds the picture in the committee's collection under Hine's number 228, captioned on the committee's own card: "Noon hour, Singer Mfg. Co. The boys work there. Location: South Bend, Indiana." The attribution to Hine himself rests on the collection's provenance, as the Library's record states it. The date does not settle: the caption card records October 1914, while the surrounding cards in the series would suggest 1908 — the Library carries both, and this section prints the conflict rather than choosing. Either year puts Hine inside the Singer noon hour in the committee's great survey of American child labor, the campaign whose photographs, South Bend's among them, carried the case for the child-labor laws. Hine was a visitor, not a South Bend photographer; but no picture made in this city has had a longer public life, and the boys at the Singer gate at noon are the city's entry in the national documentary canon.

Sources:

1. Library of Congress, National Child Labor Committee Collection — the caption card for Hine no. 228: "Noon hour, Singer Mfg. Co., The boys work there. Location: South Bend, Indiana"; attribution to Hine based on provenance; the card's date of October 1914 against the 1908 suggested by surrounding cards, both carried in the Library's record (the image and its data as republished from the Library's collection).