[3B] The Morgue / Union Analysis
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"Triangle Fire" and "Viewing Victims At The Morgue" shows members of the public looking for the bodies of their loved ones. Forty-three victims were identified in the first night; by the end of the week all but seven had been named. The victims of the Triangle Fire were almost all young unmarried women still living at home, and the people that came forward to identify them would most likely to have been parents and siblings. Most of the workers, like other working-class girls in the garment industry, contributed the better part of their paycheqes towards family expenses. Their deaths were an economic as well as personal loss to their families. Aware of the burden that families would now face in lost income and funeral expenses, Local 25 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union organised a relief campaign. $120,000 was gathered from both rich and poor, and widows and other women dependent on their daughters' earnings were given job-finding assistance. [Wertheimer, p. 311] The woman in the last photo, "After Identifying A Body", might well have been one of those widows or mothers. Her apparent grief and horror are the visual and emotional focus of the photo, eliciting our sympathy for her loss and the loss of all the parents, friends and relatives of the victims of the Triangle Fire.