Sadie Pfeiffer, Spinner in Cotton Mill, North Carolina

A young girl wearing a worn dress stands beside a cotton loom in the factory where she works. For this image, photographer Lewis Hine chose a vantage point that emphasizes the enormity of the child's environment. A series of tall windows on the right illuminate the large spinning machine that recedes into the distance and dominates the room, dwarfing the figure. Hine was known to enter factories and warehouses under false pretenses to make photographs of child laborers. He would hide a pad and pencil in his pockets to note the names and heights of his subjects. Sadie Pfeiffer, pictured here, was forty-eight inches tall when Hine captured this image. Introducing middle-class America to the ugly truth about children's working conditions, Hine's photographs, made while on assignment from the National Child Labor Committee, were instrumental in the passage of child labor laws in the United States.