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Riverside Museum  Hine foreword

LEWIS W. HINE: A DOCUMENTARY PIONEER

Elizabeth McCausland

The frontier our American pioneers had to conquer stretched over a wide continent, culturally as well as physically. Not content merely to expropriate the arts of the Old World, Americans of the New World had to find their own ways of saying what they had to say. The camera, like the cotton gin, the spinning jenney, the sewing machine, [[??]] the telephone and telegraph, electricity, was the child of the native technology. It was congenial to the hands of men who also had in their blood the memory of the wildernesses they had subdued. 

Our pioneer photographers went into the wilderness, along with surveyors, geologists and botanists. They too had their part in the winning of the West. With Hine, the trail was blazed in other wildernesses, in the chartless and unexplored misery of cotton mills, slums, sweatshops, mines and mills. With the new medium, photography, at his [[serve?]] service and with the new frontier, that of human justice, to conquer, Lewis XY Hine x made history as surely as did the early inventors and explorers. His history deals with the incontrovertible truth of human life in the United States in a given period, 1905 to 1938. It lives, and will live, because its subject matter is reality.