Even though I didn't know what had happened to that child, I decided to imagine a life for her. Who was she? Lewis Hine once said that he was 'more interested in persons than in people.' The same is true of a novelist. Hine took several photographs that August day in 1910, but the image of the girl somebody named Addie Laird is the one that endured. About this sad-eyed Vermont girl he wrote: 'Anaemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill.' To back up his photographs, Hine scribbled details in a notebook hidden in his pocket. He talked his way into mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where the bounce of his magnesium flash off the whites of a breaker boy's eyes illuminated a blackened, airless landscape. Louis, cutting sardines in Eastport, Maine. Because of Hine, comfortable middle-class Americans were forced to look at children embroidering lace in airless tenements on New York's Lower East Side, selling newspapers on crowded streets in St. From 1908 to 1918, he crisscrossed the country by train and automobile, taking pictures that brought home the hard realities of child labor. Records show that he was a traveling man. Hine had been hired by the National Child Labor Committee to bolster its written reports with documentary photographs.

I first saw her four years ago in a show devoted to Lewis Hine's pictures of child workers in Vermont. The elements of her face seem perfectly proportioned: the delicate nose, the small ears tucked back, the curve of her lips, the puff of her cheeks. A few wispy strays float around her head like a halo. To keep her hair from the frame's hungry grasp, it is pulled tight and pinned in a style befitting a grown woman.

Her left arm rests easily on the huge machinery but crooked at a strange angle, as if perhaps a bone had been broken and never set properly. Her bare feet, planted firmly, are slick with black grease. She leans casually on her spinning frame, staring out at the camera, dressed in a filthy work smock.

Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop