A tale of collective ingenuity and individual perseverance in the shadow of national crisis is the subject of Lewis Hine: The WPA National Research Project Photographs, 1936-37, on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from April 15 through July 2. The Great Depression ravaged the United States in the 1930s, producing extreme levels of poverty and unemployment with a deep and penetrating social pessimism to match. Whereas some photographic endeavors of the time sought to document the misery and misfortune of those hardest hit by these conditions, Lewis Hine set out to photograph the opposite: the optimism taking hold in the nation’s most technologically advanced sites of production, and the persistence and skill of the factory workers who made all of it a reality.
