"The Canner Kids of Baltimore, 1909 Baltimore’s oyster and vegetable canneries ran on children. “Canner Kids” started at 4am, shucked oysters or snipped beans for 14 hours, and slept in the cannery. Ages 4 to 14. No school. No gloves.
8-year-old Mamie “Bean” Kowalski was a bean snipper. Her job was to break off the ends – 2 tons per day to make $1. Her fingers bled into the beans. At night she hid under the tables and slept there because the walk to the tenement was too far.
In 1909, Lewis Hine photographed her. He asked her age. She said “I don’t remember.” He asked what she wanted to be. She said “I’d like to go to school.” The photo ran nationally with the caption “The Price of Beans.”
Public fury forced Maryland to pass its first child labor law in 1912. Mamie got to 4th grade before she had to work again. She kept Hine’s photo her whole life.
I don't think it's AI. Like, look at the bean snipping tool she is holding. Is AI capable to generating this much accurate detail? Also the machinery looks very real in the BG. The composition is also not perfect. It could be AI upscaled, though.
The snipping tool looks very similar to the gardening scissors I've seen, which there must be endless product images of. It's also a focus of the image, so the creator will probably have made sure it looks correct and might have given specific instructions for that part.
I've tried reverse searching the image and it appears to only exist on a recent facebook post. No gallery, historic site, ...
The reverse search should have been able to find a non-upscaled version too if that had been it.
Chiming in to say I did the same and had the same result. This is the facebook post. I think we're all learning in real time that unless a photo comes from reputable source like a historical society or something like that, then you can't trust that it has any provenance rooted in the real world. It takes too little effort to generate simulacrum and blast it on the internets.
P.S. Fuck facebook.