Bolting Up a Big Turbine

Lewis Wickes Hine, artist

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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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.