Consumerism and advertising implicitly ignore the manufacturing process and explicitly glorify products, which are invariably presented as shiny, new, and exciting. Hine, though, was deeply concerned by the condition of the weary children he photographed, who were being worn out, sometimes literally, by their work. In South Carolina in May 1912, he photographed a thin, weedy young man accompanied with the note, “Human Junk, Roy Hammett, Spartenberg, S.C…”

Hine returned to this theme in his poster, “Making Human Junk,” which bitterly satirized the claim that underlies most advertising – that industry transforms the material world into valuable products that make our lives richer and better. He showed how children who were “Good Material at First” entered the factories and became a “product” – “Human Junk” with “No Future and Low Wages.”

As his “Making Human Junk" poster shows, Hine used photography to break through the façade of advertising to show the destructive “pathological” side of the industrial process. He claimed in his 1909 speech on “Social Photography” that the photographer could transport his audience into the children’s work environments by showing actual working conditions in vivid, memorable pictures that have emotional appeal – sometimes accompanied by appropriate written texts. The photograph of an adolescent, a weed-like youth, who has been doffing for eight years in a mill carries its own lesson…Whether it be a painting or a photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality.

-from American Photography and the American Dream, by James Guimond, UNC Press, 1991. Used with permission from the author.

Roy Loyd Hammett was born near Gaffney, South Carolina, on January 16, 1893, according to his WWI draft registration, which he signed on June 5, 1917. At that time, he was married, with two children. His parents were South Carolina natives, as were their parents. His father was a farmer. The family was living in Spartanburg when they were counted in the 1900 census. Somehow, they escaped the 1910 census.

In the 1920 census, Roy is living in Limestone, South Carolina, with his wife Bythia, and their children, James, Claude and Jane. Roy is still working in a cotton mill, but he has been promoted to the position of loom fixer. Six years later, he was accidentally killed in a gun accident (see newspaper article on next page). Roy’s widow died in North Carolina in 1969.