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A DOCUMENTARY PIONEER Elizabeth McCausland Lewis W. Hine started out 35 years ago with a barrel of flashlight powder and a camera. Today his retrospective exhibition of 200 documentary [?] photographs on view at the Riverside Museum from January 11 to February 26. [?] re-introduces him to the American public as a spiritual father of present-day documentary photographers. Sponsored by distinguied personalities of the social sciences and the arts, including Frances Perkins, Dr. Rexford G. Tugwell, Mary van Kleeck, Paul, U, Kellogg, editor of the Survey-Graphic, and Photographers Bernice Abbott, Stierlitx, Strund and Steichen, the exhibition is an eye-opener. Here the present generation thought it was the pioneer of photographic research into social truth; and nine turns up, with these splendid photographs made 30 years ago! Hine's ealiest documents deal with Ellis Island, then at the height of its career: in one day, 12,000 immigrants clamored for admittance to the United States. And Hine was there on the spot, shooting away, burning off his eyebrows with flashlight powder, but bringing home the photograph. Sweatshops, slums, child labor in Southern cotton mills, lone hours of underpaid work in mines and factories -- these evils of present-day society are commonplaces today. A quarter of century the era of the muekraker was beginning; out journalistic Don Quixotes were tilting at trusts,