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.

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