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has a tradition of content and purposive communication. Brady has stood out as the lone hero of his doctrine. But since Brady there has been -- an historical hiatus, a dangerous severing of lines of communication with the past. The existence of an Atget in France would not suffice for the American experience.
The rediscovery of Mine means, thus, that the gap between Brady and the present has been bridged. This sense of continuity -- so much lacking in American life -- is needed because it contributes energies for growth to contemporary culture.
In Hine's work is to be found an indisputable portrait of American life a generation ago.
His photographs of 1905, 1908, 1913, prove that life was not idyllic, that the present's problems of agricultural decay and economic maladjustment existed then. That today slums still stand staring into the face of the Capitol, that children still toil in cotton fields, mills and tobacco plantations, that breadlines still thrive, is a paradox made more critical by the fact that in thirty years nothing seems to have been done about these problems.
Another point should be made. Today the separation between subject matter and art no longer exists. Whether or not Hine's photographs were taken in the name of art or of social progress, they are works of art in the important sense that they endure and will speak to future ages. Not all|are good technically, some are tinged with early 20 th century humanitarianism. But they have a major virtue: they are alive, and they are alive with warm, generous emotions -- pity for the under-privileged child and under-