Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Labor and Work

The present set is on the topic of labor and work. Most of the photographs included are held in the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, part of Cornell University Library, which maintains a significant collection of photographs illustrating American working life in the twentieth century. Of special interest are Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's time motion studies of factory work and everyday life, exemplifying the scientific management movement of the early twentieth century that changed the ways many Americans worked. Also of note are the works of Louise Boyle, whose photographs of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1937 document not just the working conditions in the fields, but also the hardships of the Depression, the celebrations of immersion baptisms, and quiet times at home.

Photographs of the Midvale Steel Works form a familiar visual vocabulary for the United States' industrial history, resonant with the imagery of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals that celebrated industrial labor. The Center is well known for its collection on the Triangle Factory fire, an industrial tragedy that took the lives of 146 people in 1911. The images documenting this event, its aftermath, and the garment industry are among the most heavily used materials in the archives.

Library holdings are complemented by photographs from the Museum's collection that expand the notion of work to include women's unpaid domestic labor and fields like art, fashion, performance, and photography itself. Photographers well known to Art History like Lewis Hine, Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, and Cornell alumna Margaret Bourke-White are represented through their images of workers and industry. Works by celebrated photographers of subsequent generations like William Klein, Larry Fink, Mary Ellen Mark, and Sebastião Salgado take new aesthetic and conceptual approaches to representing labor, while a recent four-part work by LaToya Ruby Frazier directs attention to the human cost of industrial decline.