Leslie Ureña

My dissertation concerns hundreds of photographs of newly arrived immigrants taken by the photographer and reformer Lewis Hine at the Ellis Island Immigration Station in New York between 1904 and 1926. I argue that in these photographs Hine unwittingly documented the imposition of racial categories upon newcomers by governmental authorities. As a social reformer, Hine’s agenda was to use photography to improve the treatment of immigrants and elevate their standing. Yet the compositions and their captions make clear that Hine actually reinforced and perpetuated the same racial stereotypes he wished to eradicate.

My careful examination of these photographs will expand upon current Hine scholarship, which uncritically locates these photographs within the documentary tradition and tends to sentimentalize both Hine, as a photographer and reformer, and the immigrant subject. By utilizing the contemporaneous literature on immigration and “whiteness” studies, I will reveal how Hine’s photographs are essential to our understanding of immigration and race relations in the United States. This project also questions our common notions of photographic history by taking into account photography’s historic role in shaping public opinion and policy.

I open with a consideration of the political and social circumstances that framed the definition of race in Hine’s time. In the subsequent three chapters, I distinguish between the three phases of Hine’s work at Ellis Island, establishing how changes in immigration laws and the definitions of race affected Hine’s artistic production, and how in turn his photographs served to alter public opinion. The final chapter focuses on Hine’s return to the subject of immigration in 1940 and how this retrospective glance alters our understanding of his earlier work.