Hine's photographs of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, taken in 1904, included sympathetic, individuated portraits of these otherwise anonymous and impoverished newcomers to American society.
Paul Strand (1890–1976) first studied photography with Lewis Hine (1874–1940), a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York who used the camera as a means to document the disadvantaged and effect social reforms on their behalf. Hine's photographs of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, taken in 1904, included sympathetic, individuated portraits of these otherwise anonymous and impoverished newcomers to American society. Strand refined his own photographic technique in the following years, taking inspiration from the exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery "291," and from 1915 through contact with Stieglitz himself.