USPS honors Lewis Hine with “Made In America: Building A Nation” stamps
posted Tuesday, November 19, 2013 at 1:43 PM EDT
It's hard to quantify the importance of photographer Lewis Hine's work in the United States. More than just an incredible artist, his work documenting child labor in the early days of the 20th century were instrumental in ending the practice. He spent much of his career photographing industrial workers, usually in a more positive light than his work ending child labor, and it's from this well of images that the USPS created the Made in America: Building a Nation series of stamps.
The stamps, available from your usual stamp sources, as well as USPS.com, feature 12 images, ten of which are by Hine himself. Perhaps the most famous of the stamps is his iconic "Power house mechanic working on steam pump," from 1920. Four of his images are from his work chronicling the construction of the Empire State Building. The two non-Hine images come from different sources. One is of a female welder, by Margaret Bourke-White, and an image of a coal miner from an anonymous photographer.
The stamps were actually released in August, and are available in five different sets — all of which contain the same stamp, but with different enlarged background images.
(via Shutterbug)
