Ken Light is a documentary photographer and professor at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is author of the forthcoming “Report to the Shareholders,” about the Rust Belt in America.
Recent headlines about the widespread exploitation of children in America’s workplaces shocked me as it did many in our country. It was all the worse that the exploitation targeted undocumented migrant children who had recently entered the United States, seemingly abetted by a Health and Human Services Department determined to clear unaccompanied children from detention.
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Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. As a documentary photographer of nearly five decades’ experience, I had witnessed similarly cruel treatment firsthand in the late 1970s when photographing migrant workers in the agricultural fields throughout the United States for my first book, “With These Hands.” This news story drew me to pull up film contact sheets from the work I had done all those decades ago.
Even then, what I was seeing in the fields had much older echoes. I found inspiration in the work of one of our country’s most famous social documentary photographers, Lewis Hine, who in 1908 became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice, photographing in coal mines, meatpacking houses, textile mills, canneries and many other workplaces.
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