Archive Books
Notes on Archives 3
Notes on Archives 3
In digital data banks, images travel more frequently from one archive to another than they did in analog archives. Sometimes images that are in the public domain are taken by commercial stock-image agencies and offered for sale. This is the case for a series of images of breaker boys in Pennsylvania that Lewis Hine made in the 1910s as part of his series on child labor. The images are both digitally available for free from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and for a fee from Corbis, Bill Gates’s stock-image company, which offered them for sale until it ceased operations in 2016. Hine’s work was made in the tradition of social documentary photography and with the belief that visual facts can both engender empathy and shape public opinion. Our contemporary understanding of how images are able to produce knowledge is far more ambivalent. The images of the breaker boys offered for sale on the Corbis website manifests an uncanny relationship—not only between the images of a labor struggle and the site of their recent commercialization but also between two distinct moments in the history of the medium of photography.
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