Viewing page 3 of 34

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Hine-3
tural areas -- a quarter of the century before the Farm Security Administration photographers began their admirable documentation of the nation's natural resources. 
Today the photograph is consciously used for many forms of education -- to show how communities live, how they work, how nations fight and how they build, how slums are still ever-present, how the corn-borer and soil erosion can be resisted. The rise of the picture magazines and photographic publications proves that the American people is being conditioned to be (as Lincoln Kirssein says) a "glimpsing nation." 
At the same time, serious practitioners of photography, aware of its tremendous potentialities for communication, see in the documentary approach the new frontier of the new art. Even those picture magazines which are dedicated to reactionary or trivial ends, offer a false facade of documentary photographs, often distorting essentially good materil by the printed word. In the contemporary enthusiasm for communication and content, photographers are likely to be led to think that they invented the esthetic.
On the contrary, photography is no more the discoverer of the document than [[crossed out]] the [[/crossed out]] painting or sculpture; it is simply the latest and most up-to-date method of making documents. But when photography -- or any othermedium -- wanders away from substantial content, it loses its use and reason for existence. In this respect, the current emphasis on documentary values represents a healthy phase in the history of photography.
It is valuable, then, to find that photography in America