The unusual photograph offered here is from a scarce series of Hine images of workers with physical injuries.  The Witkin Gallery label that accompanies this photograph gives Hine's negative number as 4673.  The key to negative numbers for Hine photographs for the National Child Labor Committee identifies negative numbers 4665 through 4674 as 'workers with back injuries,' and gives the date of 1916, but, atypically, does not supply a geographic location.  Images from this series are exceedingly rare; at the time of this writing, a reproduction of only one other image from this series has been located: that of a single young woman, 'Sewing Girl, Showing Curvature of the Spine,' reproduced in Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900 – 1930, th꧃e catalogue of an exhi♊bition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. 

Lee Witkin was one of the earliest dealers to handle Lewis Hine photographs from the National Child Labor Committee.  As he recounts in his 1979 memoir, A Ten Year Salute, he had 'first pick' of the thousands of photographs in the Committee's crammed file drawers on 32nd Street in New York City, and mounted two traveling exhibitions of Hine photographs, in 1971 and 1973.  'Many museums bought in quantity,' he remembered, with funds fr💯om the sale going to𝔍 help young adults find jobs (p. 60).