Charles Gilbert Hine was born in 1859 into wealth. His father was a leading insurance publisher and president of the Underwriters’ Protective Association, roles that Hine himself inherited in 1897. At the time of his Broadway survey, he was still living in his childhood home – a mansion in rural Woodside, New Jersey, now part of Newark – and commuting daily to Manhattan by ferry. In 1910, he and his brother moved to Staten Island, where they built an imposing house on Grymes Hill, an exclusive neighborhood overlooking the harbor.
A commuter from Newark, Hine captured this view of the New York City skyline from a Hudson River ferry approaching Pier 14, at the foot of Fulton Street. C. G. Hine, untitled, undated platinum photographic print. From Hine’s Broadway album, CGHPC, N-YHSNYH, 100741d.
Hine affirmed his elite status by joining the societies and committees that presided over the city’s past. A member of the New-York Historical Society and the Staten Island Historical Society, and a cofounder and president of the Staten Island Antiquarian Society, he participated in the burgeoning field of local history, delivering illustrated public lectures and helping to preserve historic structures – notably the seventeenth-century Perine House. He contributed to historical pageantry too, serving on the committee for the 250th anniversary of the formal establishment of the City of New York.
Hine also belonged to the predominantly white, male, and affluent circle of “serious” amateur photographers. Gentleman amateurs had long dominated photography, but in the 1880s they began to organize camera clubs to defend the medium’s aesthetic standards against both commercial operators and the new “Button Pressers” spawned by Kodak. In 1888, the year Kodak was introduced, Hine cofounded the Newark Camera Club, later serving as its secretary and treasurer. Its constitution preserved exclusivity by requiring two member endorsements and a $5 initiation fee (about $170 today); no women appeared among its sixty-four founding members.
Robert Bracklow, untitled photographic print [Four members of the Camera Club of New York], May 23, 1909. Box 5 , Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection, PR 008.22, N-YHSNYH, 76419d
For Hine and his brother, the club offered an opportunity to exhibit their work – including 157 photos at its inaugural show of 1891. They also exhibited at other clubs – including the Boston Art Club, alongside Alfred Stieglitz. Hine also helped to link such organizations through the American Lantern Slide Interchange and the American League of Amateur Photographers. In 1893, Cosmopolitan magazine praised the brothers: “There are but few better known than these gentlemen, and their reputation extends wherever a photographic lantern slide is sent; and so careful are they in their work that anything exhibited under their joint signature always receives the highest praise, and often prize, if any is to be awarded.”