Viewing page 9 of 34

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

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,