LEWIS HINE EXHIBITION OPENS AT THE WAREHOUSE
November 12, 2025 – April 4, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child-labor pictures will be records of the past." - Lewis Hine

MIAMI -- Records of the Past: Lewis Hine Child Labor Photographs features 60 early twentieth century works by Lewis Hine from his time working with the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Shortly after the NCLC was founded in 1904, Hine was hired as a staff photographer to document child labor law violations. In 2002, the organization was under financial distress and sold the last set of 283 photographs by Hine to dealer Laurence Miller, from whom collector Martin Z. Margulies acquired them. This rare group was found when the organization moved locations in 1978 and are significant in that they are Hine’s actual working prints. The condition of the prints is consistent with their constant use showing paper loss, creases, and tape. These working prints are being shown to the public for the first time. The exhibition is curated by associate curator of the Margulies Collection, Jeanie Ambrosio.

The special selection made for this exhibition spans the years of 1907 - 1919 and highlights Hine’s unique approach to documentation that influenced generations of photographers, including artists associated with subsequent governmental programs such as the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. In Hine’s grouping of families and children we can see the prefiguring of Walker Evan’s famous photographs of the Burroughs family and the foregrounded gestural figures of Dorothea Lange. His practice of lining up children outside of the factories may in-part draw from his background as a sociologist but became a style of photography synonymous with the issue of child labor.

Hine acknowledged the fallibility of photographs by referring to his images as “interpretive photography”. To counteract any misinformation, he kept a notebook and pencil in his coat pocket to make records of the children’s ages, schedules, living conditions and other notations about their lives. Prior to the popularization of photo essays, his insistence on including captions with the photographs was unique at a time when text was not usually paired with images in press publications. Accompanying the exhibition is an 80-page booklet designed by curatorial assistant Ariana Diaz that includes Hine’s direct observations of the subjects in his pictures. The booklet offers visitors an opportunity to view Hine’s reproductions at an intimate and slow pace.

The exhibition includes eleven categories highlighting Hine’s photographic approach and the various trades that the children worked in, including newsies and messengers, mill workers, field hands, and tenement homework, among others. In our “Let there be Light” section, we showcase custom made Plexiglas boxes to provide a unique experience of seeing both the front and back of the photographs. The backs reveal handwriting, stamps, and typewriter captions from the NCLC. In an age where digital images proliferate our lives, we hope to offer an opportunity to our visitors to consider the physicality of photographs as objects for use and information.

In 1999, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse was opened as a facility dedicated to providing educational resources to the Miami community and to house the large collection of photography. For 26 years, the photographs from the Margulies Collection have served as an educational tool underscoring a selection of important works from the history of photography. We are pleased to continue this work with Records of the Past: Lewis Hine Child Labor Photographs to further art education and visual literacy in our community.

The Margulies Collection is the largest photography collection of its kind in South Florida, with over 2,000 vintage and contemporary works from the most important figures of the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2004, Martin Z. Margulies was named by ARTnews magazine as one of the top 25 most active photography collectors in the world. The American photographs in the collection includes child labor photographs by Lewis Hine and continues with the representation of several photographers from the Farm Security Administration. A special portion of the collection comprises 200 works by Helen Levitt, renowned for her images of children in the 1930s through 1950s, particularly children of New York’s neighborhoods like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. Other highlights include selections from the New York Photo League, color photographs by Stephen Shore, and in-depth collecting of contemporary photographers like Alec Soth and Justine Kurland.