Object number1998.9.2

Ellis Island Italian Madonna

Date1903/1905

Artist Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940)

CultureAmerican

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 6 11/16 x 4 11/16 in. (17 x 11.9 cm)
Sheet: 6 11/16 x 4 7/8 in. (17 x 12.4 cm)

Credit LineGift of Alverta Van Dusen Lewis, class of 1938, in memory of her husband C. McKenzie Lewis, Jr.

On View

Not on view

Period20th c

Classification(s)

Photograph

InscribedOn verso, handwritten in pencil across entire surface: 2 E / Ellis Island / C2 [crossed out] / Italian Madonna / (1903 or 1905)? / ([illegible] copy in "Madonna" 2MI) On verso, handwritten in black ink [circled] lower left corner: 55

MarkingsOn verso, stamped upper center in blue ink: LEWIS W. HINE / INTERPRETIVE PHOTOGRAPHY / HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK

BibliographySteinorth 1996, p.44;Orville 1992 p.89 Fig 1

Vassar Exhibitions

My Brain Finally Broke: Between Truth and Fiction

Label TextThere is perhaps nothing more emblematic of our trust in photographs as instruments of truth than the twentieth-century traditions of photojournalism and documentary photography. As North Americans endured the hardships of industrialization, world wars, and the Great Depression, trusted photojournalists captured real experiences using subtle but powerful strategies of manipulation. Truth and artifice are thoroughly entangled in their photographs. Working for Life magazine, Margaret Bourke-White intensified the emotional impact of her image in the aftermath of an earthquake by including a cluster of puppies in the foreground. Lewis Hine used the camera as a tool of social reform, photographing immigrants at Ellis Island and children working in factories. In 1911 he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to make images that were used to pass child labor laws. His photographs were strengthened—rather than undermined—by their familiar, compelling compositions, which encouraged viewers’ empathy. Hine’s Ellis Island Italian Madonna overtly borrowed the recognizable, emotionally evocative trope of the Madonna and child. Likewise appropriating religious iconography, Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer Dorothea Lange carefully cropped her photograph of a woman and children in a tripartite composition in one of the most famous (and infamously manipulated) photographs of the Great Depression. The woman was identified years later as Florence Owens Thompson, a Native American who felt that the details of her life were eclipsed by the power of the photograph as a symbol of the need for unprecedented levels of government social services.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email loebcollections@vassar.edu