Almost in America: Portraits from Ellis Island

You remember Lewis Hine’s photographs of workers that added fire to the movement to outlaw child labor. That wasn’t his only legacy. Hine was a sociologist and a teacher. He took students to Ellis Island to photograph the immigrants entering America. The Ellis Island photographs led him to use photography as a means to document social problems and spark reform. In 1908 he left teaching to take photographs full time.

At Ellis Island, Hine treated his subjects with dignity, posing them as for portraits and carefully mounting and labeling each photograph. His 200 photographs of immigrants taken between 1904 and 1909 provide a lasting testimony of the hardships endured by the huddled masses yearning to breath free. See a collection of 21 of those photographs at Messy Nessy Chic.  -via Digg