Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by two social documentarians, Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) and Doris Ulmann (1882-1934). Their educational affiliation (Hine as a teacher and Ulmann as a student) at The Society for Ethical Culture in New York helped foment their interests in humanitarian issues. Both used photography as a tool to establish their place among the earliest practitioners of social documentary photography in the 20th century.

Hine and Ulmann’s portraits put a face on the disenfranchised in America. They both ventured beyond the urban environs of New York to seek out the rural heart of America in its small cities and towns.

Hine photographed the suffering of impoverished youths toiling long hours for low wages in the miserable conditions imposed in factories, mills and mining camps. These shocking images of exploited children were instrumental in bringing about social reform and abolishing what was viewed to be “child slavery”.

While Hine’s social conscience compelled him to work for relief agencies such as the National Child Labor Committee, Ulmann was moved by more lofty aspirations.

Inspired to preserve for posterity the mores and traditions of the Deep South and Appalachia that she felt would soon give way to modernity, Ulmann characterized a segment of hardworking Americans, who were tradition-bound, living simple lives and struggling through whatever adversity came their way. Although the hardships endured were chiseled in their hardened features, her soft focus technique and sympathetic perspective imbued them with a regal and proud bearing.

Comparing their work reveals a common preoccupation with the welfare of mankind, yet a polarity in style and technique. Hine employed a ‘no-nonsense’ approach to photography. His snap-shot style and crisp gelatin silver prints were well suited to his documentary application of the medium--to educate and affect social change. Ulmann’s elevated status as the well educated daughter of a prosperous textile merchant, (she was a graduate of the Clarence White School of Photography), imbued her work with an old-fashioned and proper style that belied the humble conditions facing her camera. Printed on platinum papers that are favored for their soft matte tones, the sensibility of her work harkened back to the painterly and romantic esthetic of the Photo-Secession, a turn-of-the-century photographic movement that emulated painting.

Hine and Ulmann were pioneers in photography in their own inimitable way. Both passionately dedicated to social documentation, they each laid the groundwork for the development of the photographic essay, which today is still the primary basis for visual communication in the 21st century.