America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904-1940

New York: Aperture, 1977. 142 pages, illustrations; 25 x 30 cm. Design by Marvin Israel. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Near fine. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Previous owner's blind stamp/back flyleaf, otherwise unmarked. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by arrangement. Profusely illustrated. "A compassionate realist in the tradition of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, Lewis Hine had the rare gift of being able to transcend the assignments he received as a documentary photographer by investing the most topical subject with lasting human quality. Seventy years after they were made, his Ellis Island pictures are still intensely moving: the newly arrived immigrants caught in all their bewilderment-- uncertain as to whether they will even be admitted to the promised land. How bitterly ironic that this artist and social reformer, after devoting his life to working people, should end up as so many of his subjects did-- on a welfare line. Decades earlier, he had written: "For many years I have followed the procession of child workers winding through a thousand industrial communities from the canneries of Maine to the fields of Texas. I have heard their tragic stories, watched their cramped lives, and seen their fruitless struggles in the industrial game where the odds are all against them." Like Walt Whitman before him, Lewis Hine viewed his work and art as grounded in the fluid movements of everyday lives, of history, the present and the future, expressing with vividness and responsiveness the hope for America revived in a sense of great community, and democracy as a life of free and enriching communion." - Publisher.. Paperback. Very Good. Oblong.