This photograph hit me hard yesterday, I cannot stop thinking about it. Lewis Hine was a great artist as well as a humanitarian. This spinner photograph was part of a series that helped create child labor laws in the USA, because Hines created this body of work the laws changed, the power of his images changed things, instead of meaningless statistics the people became real, he humanized them.
I have to be able to capture this feeling in my work, simple, direct and powerful. There is a debt owed when someone allows you to photograph them, you owe them a photograph that speaks to the truth of who they are.
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June 25:
Mr. Joe Manning provided more information about this famous photograph:
Cora Lee Griffin, Whitnel, North Carolina, December 1908. Photo by Lewis Hine.
One of the spinners in Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co. N.C. She was 51 inches high. Had been in mill 1 year. Some at night. Runs 4 sides, 48 cents a day. When asked how old, she hesitated, then said "I don't remember." Then confidentially, "I'm not old enough to work, but I do just the same." Out of 50 employees, ten children about her size, December 1908.
Cora Lee Griffin was born July 12, 1896, in Caldwell County, North Carolina. She was the daughter of Daniel Perry Griffin and Caroline Collins Griffin. She married David Cresson. In the 1910 census, Cora is listed as a spinner in the cotton mill, and her father and four of her sisters also work there. In the 1920 census, she is living with her husband and two children, two houses away from her parents. She is still a spinner at the mill, and her husband also works there. In the 1930 census, she is no longer working, her husband works at a furniture factory, and they have four children.
Cora’s husband, David, passed away in Lenoir in 1968. Cora passed away on June 3, 1985, just short of her 89th birthday. She was survived by two sons, three daughters, eight grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, one brother and one sister. A hundred years after she was photographed by Lewis Hine, she has finally been identified, and her little place in history is firmly established.
