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Description

Exhibiting Child Labor: A Look at Lewis Hine’s Exhibit Panels for the NCLC is a poster based upon my capstone research project of the same name. It examines how child welfare exhibitions during the 1910s functioned as powerful tools of education, propaganda, and social reform, with a particular focus on exhibit panels designed by social photographer Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Progressive reformers transformed empirical research on the harms of child labor into visually compelling narratives that helped to reshape public understanding of the issue in the United States.

As industrialization expanded at the turn of the twentieth century, so did the exploitation of children in the labor force. In response, the NCLC turned to exhibitions by using a multimodal approach where they combined photographs, charts, and text to create emotionally engaging displays that communicated their message of reform to a broad audience in cities across the country. Central to this campaign were Hine’s photographs and exhibit panels, produced between 1908 and 1918. This project analyzes panels such as Boys in Glass Houses (1913) and Making Human Junk (c. 1914) to demonstrate how Hine integrated visual evidence with carefully crafted language to create eye-catching exhibits with messages meant to educate, appeal directly to viewers' emotions, as well as encouraging them to take action against child labor. His work balanced claims of objectivity with emotional appeal, guiding viewers toward specific interpretations of child labor as being physically, emotionally, and morally harmful to child workers.

Publication Date

4-30-2026

Keywords

Child labor, history

Exhibiting Child Labor: A Look at Lewis Hine's Exhibit Panels for the NCLC

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