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Lewis Hine as Social Critic. By Kate SampsellWillmann. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. xii, 331 pp. $50.00, isbn 9781-60473-368-6.)
In the foreword to Lewis Hine as Social Critic, Alan Trachtenberg notes that the important early documentary photographer Lewis Hine had the technical and intellectual capacity to control the output of his camera. His pictures did not simply record what was in front of Hine; they looked that way because he meant them to look that way (p. ix). It is therefore important to understand Hine's intellectual development. Kate Sampsell-Willmann grapples with the photographer as intellectual in this important if somewhat flawed study.
Two major themes are developed throughout the book: first, that Hine fully participated in the intellectual life of the early twentieth century, as a student of John Dewey...