Power House Mechanic

1920-1921

The clean muscularity and precise industrial order presented by Lewis Hine in Power House Mechanic demonstrates the photographer’s shift, in 1919, from a gritty documentary style to what he called “interpretive photography”—an approach intended to raise the stature of industrial workers, who were increasingly diminished by the massive machinery they operated. Despite his concern for the worker, Hine’s use of hand-selected and precisely posed models actually helped to cement the pictorial formulas employed by burgeoning corporate public-relations departments.