Climbing into the Promised Land, Ellis Island

Trained as a sociologist, Lewis Wickes Hine began a career in photography in 1905, when, as a teacher, he brought his class to Ellis Island. While encouraging his students to use cameras as part of their studies, Hines himself started to photograph and ultimately became a photojournalist. In this extraordinary image, immigrants in heavy coats and with their paperwork in hand climb a congested staircase in the process of becoming American citizens; Hine managed to juggle a huge, awkward camera while manipulating a crude device loaded with flash powder in order to compose this gripping picture of hope, confusion, and excitement. When he died, in 1940, Hine left behind a legacy of several thousand images of dazzling quality and social import, many of them portraits of workers, often children.