Photography

In the early 20th century, American photography expanded from its base in portraiture and landscape to become both an increasingly important art medium and a form of social documentation that revealed social problems and expressed political ideas. At the same time, photography became democratized, as newer, simpler, and cheaper cameras made photographs available to ordinary people. The technology of photography, from lens to cameras, film, and processing, made the snapshot the most common form of portraiture, archiving personal and public memories and capturing in still photography celebrations, family gatherings, and the mileposts of everyday life. As tourism became a common pastime, photographers found new subjects in landscapes, public monuments, and leisure activities. During the first 30 years of the century, the work of two influential American photographers—Alfred Stieg-litz, who transformed photography into a genre of art and mentored the next generation, including Edward Steichen and Ansel Adams; and Lewis W. Hine, whose documentary photography inspired the next generation of social journalists, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange—captured the imagination of elite and popular audiences.

It was in 1900 that Kodak introduced the first Brownie box roll-film camera, an invention that made photography available to ordinary families. While portrait studios continued to play a role in commemorating life stages, the box camera made it possible to record not simply life course events but everyday picnics, baseball games, family reunions, and gatherings of friends in snapshots that were relatively easy to develop, reproduce, and share. Much of this had been under way by the turn of the century, as George Eastman took older plate methods of photography and introduced roll film and a developing process called “photofinishing,” the cost of which was figured into the price of a roll of film. With further refinements, Eastman’s Kodak cameras quickly dominated the market, so that the hordes of new snapshot photographers became known as “Kodakers.” The company continued to lead the industry by improving and simplifying cameras and processing. By 1906, panchromatic black-and-white film, which made high-quality color separation photography possible, was introduced, but color photography was not available to the mass market until Kodak introduced new color film in the 1930s and 1940s.

Much of the basic technology for photography was in place by the turn of the century. What was different was how photography increasingly was used as a form of artistic expression and made inroads into the galleries and museums of fine art. The individual most responsible for these changes was Alfred Stieglitz. In contrast to amateur photographers, Stieglitz and other pictorialists, including Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White, and Edward Stei-chen, focused on composition and darkroom techniques in their photography, shunning the easy composition and uncontrolled spontaneity of snapshots. The group promoted a new aesthetic for photography in what they called the Photo Secession. They exhibited their work at the 291 Gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue, understanding photography not simply as a mirror of reality but as an artistic lens. Stieglitz was the chief spokesman of the new movement, mentoring younger photographers, expanding the exhibition space available for photographic work, and editing the central publication of the Photo Secession, Camera Work, from 1903 to 1917. His own photographic work took a turn away from the self-consciously artistic techniques of the Photo Secession to what Stieglitz considered “straight photography,” without, that is, darkroom transformations or altered media. At the same time, in his categorization of “art photography” apart from documentary work, Stieglitz polarized photographic criticism and shaped the reception of documentary photography for decades to come.

The individual whose career and work contrasts most sharply with that of art photographers was Lewis W. Hine, a

Photograph of a horse-drawn coach during a snowstorm in New York City by Alfred Stieglitz, ca. 1905 (Library of Congress)

Generation younger than Stieglitz and a politically committed photographer. Drawing on earlier documentary photography, Hine focused his camera work on the world of ordinary workers, in particular child laborers at their jobs in factories, textile mills, canneries, mines, and working in the street trades. Between 1907 and 1917, Hine created a remarkable series of photographs of child labor for the National Child Labor Committee. He also worked for the Pittsburgh Survey under the leadership of Paul Kellogg. Often working in dark and gloomy spaces, Hine improvised new techniques that allowed for the conditions and time constraints. He reinvented portraiture with his informal photographs of children working at looms, immigrant steelworkers gathered on a stoop, men on the steel girders of bridges and buildings. Employed by the American Red Cross, Hine photographed war refugees and displaced persons in a Europe devastated by world war. By the 1920s, Hine returned his lens to the urban workplace. His classic photographs, published in 1932 as Men at Work, captured both the working conditions and the aesthetics of labor in the United States. In particular, Hine’s photographs of the construction of the Empire State Building, a series begun in 1930, stood out.

While Hine understood and contributed to the technique, aesthetic, and content of photography, he was not always recognized as an artist by art critics and photographers. For the most part, Hine saw himself less as an artist and more as a photographer doing the cultural labor of investigating and educating the public about the lives of immigrant workers and child laborers. As historian Alan Trachtenberg notes, Hine’s goal was not photographs in an exhibition but published images. Nevertheless, his photographs are understood today as both social documentary and art, with their bold, moving, and insightful images and their ability to capture human experience. His work, as the work of Stieglitz and others of their periods, laid the basis for modern American photography and provided us with a visual archive of their time.

See also ART; JOURNALISM.

Further reading: Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000); Miles Orvell, American Photography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading Photography: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).

Pinchot, Gifford (1865-1946) conservationist, politician

Gifford Pinchot was one of the leading naturalists and conservationists of the 20th century and played a crucial role in the development of the conservation movement. From 1893 to 1910, he headed the U. S. Forest Service, during which time he had tremendous influence on President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation policies. Under Roosevelt’s administration, the number of national forests increased from 32 to 149, covering 193 million acres. The son of a New York businessman, Pinchot became interested in forestry and conservationism at an early age. After graduating from Yale in 1885, he spent several years studying forestry in Europe. Pinchot’s rise to prominence began when he was appointed to the National Forest Commission in 1897. Because of his service on the commission, President William McKinley named him chief forester of the United States in 1898.

By the 1880s and 1890s, the nation’s appetite for natural resources, particularly timber, had become insatiable; and vast tracts of forest were rapidly disappearing. Where preservationists such as John Muir believed that some regions of the country and some natural resources ought to be off-limits to growth and development, Pinchot and other conservationists concluded that it was neither realistic nor desirable that commercial use of natural resources be curbed or eliminated. If the nation’s economy was to continue growing, it needed a constant supply of resources. For these reasons, Pinchot pushed the federal government to become actively involved in land use management. He argued that the government had to ensure that the nation’s resources were not squandered and wasted by inefficient and careless use. By 1910, two years after William Howard Taet became president, Pinchot concluded that the government had abandoned its commitment to conservationism. After filing suit against Richard Achilles Ballinger, Taft’s secretary of the interior, Pinchot was dismissed as head of the Forest Service.

After he left the federal government, Pinchot launched a successful career as a progressive Republican politician. In 1914, he ran for and lost the Senate seat in Pennsylvania. His platform included support for women’s right to vote, a graduated income tax, a workmen’s compensation law, and the right of workers to form legally recognized labor unions. After this initial setback, Pinchot went on to win the Pennsylvania governorship in 1922 and again in 1930. As governor, he instituted numerous bureaucratic and legislative reforms and recruited women, African Americans, and Jews to serve in his administration. In addition, Pin-chot helped to establish rural electrification and anti-poverty programs and frequently sided with organized labor, using his office on several occasions to resolve protracted labor disputes.

Although an important progressive Republican, Pinchot’s lasting contribution came from his views of land use and the conservation of natural resources. His views played an important role in shaping both the conservation movement and the federal government’s approach toward land use from the turn of the century until the rise of the modern environmental movement of the 1960s. Conserva-tionism provided a much-needed balance to the dominant free market approach toward natural resources and the environment, but it also served to mute the preservationist impulse and legitimized the nation’s insatiable use of natural resources under the guise of wise and efficient use.

Further reading: Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot: The Evolution of an American Conservationist (Milford, Pa.: Grey Towers Press, 1992).

—Robert Gordon

Pingree, Hazen S. (1840-1901) Republican mayor of Detroit and governor of Michigan

Hazen Pingree is best known as a reform mayor of Detroit and as the governor of Michigan. An early Progressive, Pin-gree advocated stronger government regulation of transportation and electric and gas utilities, and he sought to end political corruption. During his time in office as mayor (1890-97) and governor (1897-1901), he advocated a wide range of reforms, including the eight-hour workday and the direct election oe senators.

Born in Denmark, Hazen Pingree emigrated to the United States at an early age. He worked as a shoemaker and served in the Union Army during the Civil War with the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Regiment. After the war, he moved to Michigan and worked as a cobbler. In 1872, he married Frances A. Gilbert. The couple had three children, two of whom survived to adulthood (Joe and Hazel). Pingree established his own business, the Pin-gree and Smith Shoe Company, in 1866. The success of the firm allowed him to engage in local politics.

In 1889, Pingree ran for mayor in Detroit. Elected on a platform of cleaning up corruption, he took on the job of reforming city street and sewer contracts and the school board. He led the fight against privately owned gas and electric utilities and took on the Detroit City Railways in an effort to lower their fares. When the company’s president, Tom L. Johnson, resisted, Pingree set up a municipally owned company to compete with Johnson’s private monopoly on city transportation. In the 1893 depression, Pingree created new public-welfare programs to feed the unemployed, poor, and homeless. As part of the effort, he organized public works projects to build new schools and parks and set up a program to give public land for vegetable gardens to the poor.

Pingree successfully ran for the governorship in Michigan in 1896, before he had finished his term as mayor. A court case ensued, contesting his right to hold two public offices at the same time. The Michigan Supreme Court decided against the new governor, and he resigned from his city office. As Michigan governor, Pingree advocated a graduated income tax, new railroad taxes, and further political reforms.

After Pingree finished his term as governor, he joined a safari to Africa with Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Stopping in London on the return home, Pingree became ill and died of peritonitis at age 60. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.

See also progressivism; urban reeorm; urban transportation.

Further reading: Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).