In 1907, 33-year-old Lewis Hine was hired as a photographer for the Pittsburgh Survey. Conducted over two years with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Pittsburgh Survey was a groundbreaking socioeconomic study providing one of the first in-depth looks at life in a large American industrial city.
Pittsburgh was selected as a prototypical steel mill town. A group of 70 researchers, led by journalist Paul Kellogg, documented the lives of “workingmen,” many of them recent immigrants from central and eastern Europe. The resulting study gave a thorough account of labor conditions and wages, housing, social institutions, and family life. It was published in six volumes from 1909 to 1914.
The Frick Pittsburgh is currently displaying photographs that span Hine’s three-decade career in an exhibition titled “Lewis Hine Pictures America” (on view through May 17, 2026). He photographed a wide array of subjects like newly arrived immigrants from Ellis Island, the workers constructing the Empire State Building, the harsh realities for child laborers, and steel industry workers in Pittsburgh during his time with the Pittsburgh Survey.
The Pittsburgh Survey Findings
In the Survey’s findings, Kellogg condemned “the destruction of family life,” which he meant not “in any imaginary or mystical sense,” but as the direct result of demanding working conditions, industrial accidents, and typhoid outbreaks, “preventable, but costing in single years in Pittsburgh considerably more than a thousand lives, and irretrievably shattering nearly as many homes.”
Researchers hoped to catalyze Progressive Era reform efforts, especially regarding child labor and welfare. The survey led to major improvements, including the construction of the city’s first water purification plant to stop typhoid outbreaks and the establishment of new workers' compensation laws.
Lewis Hine & the Survey
Hine joined the Pittsburgh Survey as a trained sociologist, and given limited direction, documented the lives of immigrant workers and housing conditions in Homestead and other parts of the city. Moving away from more stylized or composed photography, like his earlier Ellis Island portraits, Hine shot more documentary images, particularly of children, beginning to grow his status as “the father of documentary photography.”
“I think if you're looking at Lewis Hine as a photojournalist, the Pittsburgh Survey is the place to look,” Bella Hanley, collections and exhibitions assistant at The Frick Pittsburgh, said. “In my opinion, [it] represents some of the truest photojournalism of his career, as we would understand photojournalism today.”
While sociology is considered scientific, Hanley said, Hine also explicitly used his photographs as a tool for social reform.
Hine’s Photography as Social Reform
“There's also this emotional appeal that is being made, because his photos are meant to tug at the heartstrings and to get people invested in this work,” Hanely said.
This pathos is especially evident in the titles of Hine's photos. The Frick’s “Lewis Hines Pictures America” exhibition includes a 1908 photo titled “Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburgh Institution.” The photo of a young girl alone in an empty room became associated with the fictional character Little Orphan Annie, later popularized in a 1924 comic strip.
Other survey photos are titled “Into America Through the Second Ward of Homestead,” featuring a child in a bonnet, and “When Meadows Have Grown Too Many Smokestacks,” showing a laughing child whose face is covered in soot. Along with photographing work, industry, and often crowded housing, Hine also documented scenes of leisure and repose (“A Bit of Gossip”), capturing Homestead’s only playground, Homesteaders at a nickelodeon theater, and Kennywood.
“Lewis Hine Pictures America” at The Frick Pittsburgh
While Hine was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908, where he produced his most widely known “big banner, iconic images,” Hanley said, photographs from the Pittsburgh Survey may be more familiar to Pittsburghers.
In a “moment of synchronicity,” Hanley noted that a member of the Frick staff discovered an originally unsourced photo used on The Frick’s “Gilded, Not Golden” tours of Clayton showing a steelworker’s one-room house, a relatively rare image, was in fact Lewis Hine’s from the Pittsburgh Survey.
Hanley notes Hine was taking photographs in a specific interregnum period in the early 20th century, between the Battle of Homestead and the rise of the New Deal reforms, when labor power was diminished. As Henry Clay Frick “shaped generations of labor and life in Pittsburgh,” Lewis Hine was there to document the material reality on the ground and advocate for reform.
Showing Hine’s photographs at The Frick “carries that weight,” Hanley said. “I think it rounds out the picture.”
See some of Hine’s photographs from the Pittsburgh Survey when you visit Lewis Hine Pictures America, now on view at The Frick Pittsburgh until May 17. Tickets are available here.
Rachel Wilkinson is a Pittsburgh-based writer and reporter researcher whose essays and profiles have appeared locally in Pittsburgh City Paper and nationally in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Esquire, and others.