Bolting Up a Big Turbine, Lewis Wickes Hine

Artwork Overview

Lewis Wickes Hine, Bolting Up a Big Turbine
Lewis Wickes Hine, Bolting Up a Big Turbine
Lewis Wickes Hine
Bolting Up a Big Turbine
1920
Lewis Wickes Hine
1874–1940
Bolting Up a Big Turbine, 1920
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: gelatin silver print
Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 19.2 x 24.2 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 7 9/16 x 9 1/2 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 14 x 19 in
Credit line: Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund
Accession number: 1986.0064
Not on display
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Label texts

Archive Label: The seemingly natural activity of the male body-performing physical labor-is the ostensible subject of this photograph. The laborer’s thighs, back, and head link with the wrench he wields to form a curve in harmony with the bold geometries of the turbine itself. By this aesthetic statement, Hine, a committed liberal reformer, argues the potential harmony of workers with the machine. But there is something amiss in this picture. Because the worker is clearly in the wrong position to work the bolt, the picture refuses to support Hine’s intention to represent the harmony possible in working-class labor. Rather than see the laborer harmoniously transcending the tedium of work, we see him still at work, but this time in the service of the aesthetics of Modernist formalism and the politics of progressive liberalism.