Eye of Conscience

Through text and photography, American historian Milton Meltzer’s The Eye of Conscience (1974) profiles ten photographers whose work helped effect social change. The photographers profiled include Timothy O'Sullivan, Jacob Riis, Lewis W. Hine, Dorothea Lange, William Mackey Jr., Martin Schneider, Fung Lam, Michael Abramson, Ira Nowinski, and Morrie Gambi.

Born in 1840, Timothy O'Sullivan served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Though primarily tasked with map and fieldwork, O'Sullivan took photographs as a hobby. In 1862, O'Sullivan followed Major General John Pope's Northern Virginia Campaign, taking photographs of after-battle scenes. Unlike most wartime photographers who captured images of armies in preparation for battle, O'Sullivan sought to depict the grim realities of war by photographing dead soldiers. His most famous photograph, "The Harvest of Death," depicts dead soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg. Rather than glorify war, O'Sullivan's photographs provided Americans with a glimpse of its gruesome costs.

A journalist and documentary photographer, Jacob Riis captured the squalor and hardship of impoverished New Yorkers in the late nineteenth century. Originally a writer, Riis learned photography in order to depict more vividly the struggles of poor Americans. One of the biggest challenges he faced was how to use early photography techniques—which relied on bright sources of light—to capture the dark streets and interiors where many of his subjects lived and struggled. Using magnesium powder heated in a frying pan, Riis and his team were among the first Americans to use flash photography. In 1890, Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, a landmark work of photojournalism and social muckraking that directly led to various housing reforms. Among these was the New York Tenement House Act that required buildings to have more light, better ventilation, and higher fire safety standards.



In 1908, the American sociologist and photographer Lewis W. Hine joined the National Child Labor Committee, a non-profit organization committed to child labor reform. Capturing the working conditions of child laborers was dangerous work, and Hine frequently received death threats from factory police and foremen who didn't want the public to know they used and mistreated child laborers. In order to gain access to these workplaces, Hine often posed as a fire inspector or an industrial photographer charged with documenting machinery. By ripping the veil off these immoral labor practices, Hine and his organization were successful in urging the federal government to pass a number of laws prohibiting interstate commerce of goods produced through child labor. Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court deemed most of these laws unconstitutional. Nevertheless, they helped pave the way for later pieces of legislation such as the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which to this day is the chief child labor law in the United States.

In the 1930s, Dorothea Lange worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program aimed at combating poverty during the Great Depression. By photographing migrant workers, sharecroppers, and displaced farm families, she helped expose the exploitation of these Americans to the wider public. In commenting on her most famous and recognizable photo, Migrant Mother, Lange said, "She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." Later, Lange also documented the internment of Japanese Americans following the Pearl Harbor attack.

Born in 1920, William Mackey, Jr. was an African-American professor who lived in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. A self-taught photographer, Mackey captured poignant scenes of city life during the 1960s, depicting both the struggles and joys of predominantly black neighborhoods with striking richness.



Michael Abramson was a Chicago photographer who captured images of African-American nightlife on Chicago's South Side during the 1970s. He published these works in a Master's thesis titled "Black Night Clubs of Chicago's South Side." Of his experience, he wrote, "I realize I have been to every part of the planet. But I have never been as far away as I was when I was on the South Side of Chicago. Not because it was exotic, but because it was so exhilarating."

Also in the 1970s, photographer Ira Nowinski set out to document the experiences of Jews in the twentieth century, particularly in San Francisco. He gave particular focus to Russian-American Jews who fled the anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union.

With The Eye of Conscience, Meltzer makes a compelling argument that empathy is as important as artistry when it comes to documentary photography.