7.3.1: Visual Documentation of Class, Race, and Labor

During the second half of the nineteenth century, photography emerged as both a descriptive and typological tool—a mirror of modern society’s hierarchies, occupations, and identities. Industrialization and urban expansion created unprecedented contrasts between wealth and poverty, progress and displacement. The camera, with its ability to record detail and repeat reality, became a favored instrument through which artists, reformers, and scientists sought to define, catalogue, and often control the human condition. Whether in the cobbled streets of London, the slums of New York, or the colonial outposts of India, photography’s claim to truth turned it into an arbiter of class, race, and labor.

Europe: The Urban Poor and the Working Class

In the rapidly industrializing cities of Europe, photographers turned their lenses toward the visible effects of modernization. John Thomson’s series Street Life in London (1877), created with journalist Adolphe Smith, stands among the first sustained efforts to document the urban poor as social evidence rather than picturesque curiosity. Thomson’s The Crawlers (fig. 1) depicts destitute women and children sleeping on doorsteps—an image that combined journalistic immediacy with moral appeal. By pairing each photograph with Smith’s essays, Thomson positioned photography as a civic instrument capable of persuading a literate public to reform the very conditions it recorded.¹

A decade earlier, Scottish photographer Thomas Annan had undertaken a similar project in Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow (1868–71). Working under commission from the city’s sanitary authorities, Annan photographed tenement alleys slated for demolition. Prints such as Close, No. 46 Saltmarket (fig. 2) reveal narrow passageways glistening with damp, the geometry of stone and shadow suggesting both the endurance and decay of industrial life. Annan’s work, though bureaucratic in purpose, achieved a haunting lyricism that anticipates later social documentary.²

Across the Channel, early French photographers such as Auguste Belloc and Charles Nègre recorded street vendors, chimney sweeps, and artisans. Nègre’s The Chimney Sweeps (1851) captured laborers descending the streets of Paris at daybreak, their dark silhouettes offset against the white plaster walls.³ These images, often produced with official sanction, balanced observation with sentiment, rendering workers as emblems of honest toil within a changing metropolis.

By the fin de siècle, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) expanded this documentary impulse into a full-fledged archive of modernity’s disappearance. Atget’s Petits métiers de Paris (fig. 3) portrayed street hawkers, rag-pickers, and tradesmen whose livelihoods were vanishing amid Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. His frontal, unembellished compositions lent dignity to marginal subjects, fusing ethnography with quiet poetry.⁴ Similarly, Adolphe Braun photographed flower sellers and rural workers in Alsace, merging commercial purpose with sentimental realism. His large albumen prints of peasant life catered to an urban bourgeois clientele eager for visions of rustic authenticity—a nostalgia for stability in an age of upheaval.⁵

The United States: Labor, Industry, and Reform

In the United States, photography’s descriptive authority served both commerce and conscience. The partnership of Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes produced elegant daguerreotypes of Boston professionals, artisans, and workers. Their Fireman Standing with His Engine (c. 1850) exemplifies an early American respect for labor and craftsmanship rendered through light and silver.⁶

By the 1880s, photographers were turning their attention to the darker side of industrial expansion. Jacob Riis (1849–1914) exposed the squalor of immigrant tenements in How the Other Half Lives (1890). In Bandit’s Roost, Mulberry Bend (fig. 4), his magnesium flash penetrates a narrow alley crowded with figures who stare directly at the intruding lens. Riis believed that seeing was the first step toward moral reform; his photographs functioned as both evidence and exhortation.⁷ Although often criticized for their paternalism, they helped to launch Progressive Era social legislation.

Lewis Hine (1874–1940) refined Riis’s moral documentary into a more systematic sociology. Trained in education and ethics, Hine used his camera for the National Child Labor Committee to expose the exploitation of industrial youth. Breaker Boys in a Coal Mine, Pennsylvania (fig. 5) presents a row of soot-streaked children whose direct gaze indicts the viewer. Hine’s later series Men at Work (1932) celebrated labor’s dignity, transforming industrial workers into heroic figures of modern democracy.⁸ His photographs balance the scientific impulse to classify with a humanist desire to affirm individuality—an equilibrium that defines much twentieth-century social photography.

Survey photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan also contributed to this dialogue by depicting labor embedded within the landscape. While his Harvest of Death (Gettysburg, 1863) remains an iconic Civil War image, his later views for the U.S. Geological Surveys—railway builders dwarfed by canyons and cliffs—situated human industry within the sublime vastness of the American West. These images, though commissioned for scientific and territorial purposes, reveal the intertwining of labor, empire, and vision.⁹

Colonial and Global Contexts

Beyond Europe and America, photography served as an administrative technology of empire—cataloguing the colonized world under the guise of science. British naturalist John Lamprey (active 1860s) devised standardized anthropometric grids behind his subjects to measure bodily proportion, producing dehumanizing records that conflated physical form with racial hierarchy (fig. 6).¹⁰ Similarly, Francis Galton’s composite portraits attempted to distill “racial types” through statistical averaging, illustrating how photography’s precision could be weaponized as pseudoscience.

Travel photographers such as Felice Beato and Samuel Bourne chronicled the British presence in Asia. Beato’s Lucknow: The Residency, after the Mutiny (1858) depicted the ruins of rebellion, turning imperial conquest into spectacle.¹¹ Bourne’s expansive landscapes of the Himalayas and India’s tea plantations often included laborers as picturesque staffage—tiny figures subsumed by geography, testifying to both colonial reach and the scale of human toil.¹²

Yet within this global matrix, photography also became a means of resistance and self-representation. African-American daguerreotypist James Presley Ball (1825–1904) operated a thriving studio in Cincinnati, producing portraits that asserted dignity and sophistication in defiance of racist imagery. His Portrait of Frederick Douglass (c. 1850) stands as a counter-archive to Lamprey’s typologies, embodying Douglass’s conviction that photography could “make the world see the colored man as a man.”¹³ Later, Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) photographed the students of Hampton Institute for her Hampton Album (1900). These carefully staged images of education and craftsmanship reframed Black progress within the language of refinement and industry (fig. 7). While still shaped by white patronage, Johnston’s work visualized racial uplift and offered a complex intersection of reform, pedagogy, and representation.¹⁴

By the early twentieth century, the visual documentation of class, race, and labor had transformed photography into a critical language of modernity. Whether sympathetic or exploitative, reformist or bureaucratic, these images defined what society chose to see—and, equally, what it refused to see. The camera’s gaze, oscillating between empathy and control, revealed that every act of description was also an act of power.

Notes

1. John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London (London: Sampson Low, 1877).
2. Thomas Annan, The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow (Glasgow: Corporation of Glasgow, 1878); see Sara Stevenson, Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1990).
3. Charles Nègre, Les Ramoneurs (1851), in Helmut Gernsheim, The History of Photography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 183.
4. Eugène Atget, in Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 23–45.
5. James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 61.
6. Grant B. Romer, Southworth & Hawes: The Spirit of Enterprise (Rochester: George Eastman House, 2005).
7. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890); Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel C. Abrahams, Rediscovering Jacob Riis (New York: The New Press, 2014).
8. Lewis Hine, Men at Work (New York: Macmillan, 1932); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 169–182.
9. Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 34–39.
10. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 84–89.
11. David Harris, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Toronto: ROM, 2011), 58–63.
12. Ray Desmond, Victorian India in Focus: A Selection of Early Photographs from the Collection in the India Office Library and Records (London: HMSO, 1982), 37–40.
13. Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 18–21.
14. Frances Benjamin Johnston, The Hampton Album (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966); Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 112–115.

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