In Photos: Celebrating the Work of Lewis Hine

Italian family on the ferry boat landing at Ellis Island, 1905

Hine photographed immigrants at Ellis Island from 1904 to 1909, taking some 200 photographs in all. The work has drawn comparisons to that of Jacob Riis, the Danish-American social photographer and journalist who chronicled the lives of impoverished people on New York City’s Lower East Side.

Mother and child, Ellis Island (Italian Madonna), circa 1907

Hine’s Ellis Island photographs are often praised for maintaining the integrity of his subjects, shooting them as individuals without exoticizing their pilgrimage