The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) has announced that Jim Hubbard, award-winning photojournalist and Creative Director of Venice Arts, is among 10 honorees of the 2007 Lewis Hine Award. Hubbard is just one of two recipients of the Distinguished Service Award, given to business leaders and individuals in the public eye who have made a positive impact on the welfare of the nation’s children and youth.
The Lewis Hine Awards for Service to Children and Youth are named for acclaimed photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, and were established by the NCLC in 1985. Hine’s unsettling images of children laboring in sweatshops, coal mines, textile mills and on farms advanced the enactment of state and federal laws to protect the rights of children in the workplace.
“I am humbled to be given the Lewis Hine Award because he was a man who I greatly admire,” comments Jim Hubbard. “I have studied his work over the years and been inspired by it. To be honored by a group like the National Child Labor Committee and in the name of Lewis Hine for my work, to be characterized as even remotely similar and emulating him is about as high an honor that I can imagine. Additionally, receiving the Lewis Hine Distinguished Service Award is a wonderful honor and reflects also on the soul and spirit of Venice Arts and their continuing mission to help disadvantaged youth through photography and other arts.”
The awards ceremony will be held on Monday, January 29, in New York City.
A documentary photographer and photojournalist for 40 years, Hubbard is being honored for using his camera, like Hine, to call attention to the plight of low-income, homeless, Native American, gang-involved and disabled children. The pioneer of “participant-produced photography,” he also is being recognized for his work with Venice Arts and for his founding of Shooting Back. He is the first photographer receiving this award. Previous winners of the Lewis Hine award include such luminaries as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Oprah, Tipper Gore, Joan Ganz Cooney and Charles Schulz.
Later this year, the Venice Arts Gallery will host a retrospective of Hubbard’s work, in honor of his award.
