Gearing up for the weekend

<drum roll>

Question

Has looking at a Lewis Hine photograph ever made you weep?

I was asked this yesterday by a scholar (in certain ways, THE scholar) who knows Hine's work well.  It was in the middle of a conversation that was more or less academically-oriented - the usual questions about Hine's practice of image-making.  It caught me off-guard, not because it's an irrelevant question to ask about those images but because I've never heard an academic ask somebody that.

Truly, Hine's pictures are hard to look at.  All the images I'm writing about are hard to look at, which is maybe why scholars don't often seem to look at them very carefully.  I think one of the most difficult things about these (and other early social documentary) photographs is that there was so much invested in their making, that the photographers really believed that pictures would move their audiences more than they actually did.  But no, I haven't cried.  The question is really sticking with me, though.

More Saturday!

Let it be known that somebody at the Library of Congress also appreciates the roller skate:
Crazy Sk8

Saturday