Deanonymizing Sherman and Hine's photographs
His was a simple request to the staff who worked in the Main Building where the immigrants were processed: 'if you see an interesting face, an arresting costume, contact Gus Sherman immediately!' [i]
Representation matters
Taking a more immersive approach to Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine's Ellis Island portraits can reveal complicated and sometimes unsettling backstories—stories that provide deeply ironic but sobering checks to the photos' long-standing visual ubiquity. Though the photos endure, more widely seen than ever before, little has been written about the lives captured on those silver gelatin prints.[ii]Peter Mesenhöller's collection of Sherman's work includes portraits of anonymous individuals that at first glance appear to be immigrants but also with many that, given the restrictive immigration laws at the time, simply couldn't have been. This made me curious about the intentions behind Sherman's work (was he just looking for interesting faces and costumes?) and wonder about the identities of his subjects even more. Who were they? What became of them? I wouldn't get anywhere without their names, a detail Sherman rarely recorded. Eventually, I met with some success in identifying a few individuals and groups.[iii] In turn, this led me to start this project on photography from the era of mass immigration—in part because of the deep unease I felt with Sherman's portraits after subjecting them to some scrutiny.
Like other documentary photographers of the day, both Sherman and Hine did not record or at least divulge the names of most of their photographic subjects—making research into the details surrounding their immigration and ultimate fate near impossible to determine. Anonymity aside, their photos have cast a long shadow and continue to circulate in various formats. Perhaps their amorphousness is part of the allure; people see in them what they want to see, or what others have wanted. Given their ubiquity, it is important to say something beyond the often misleading captions about who they were, regardless of whether they were actual immigrants or not.
Trying to identify and, if possible, determine what became of the subjects in Sherman and Hine's portraits can be a frustrating endeavor, taking the researcher through a myriad of false starts, conflicting data and dead ends. But some new resources and archival platforms are helping to make the task slightly less impossible. While on this path, I discovered that others have tried to do something similar because I caught the trail of their research while conducting my own. However, in most of those cases, their conclusions lie in unexpected and nearly unreachable places—and can't be found unless you already know the names.There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.
Lewis Hine [iv]
In any case, trying to deanonymize Sherman and Hine's portraits was the real starting point for this project. I was mainly interested in digging deeper into their photos because many struck me as captivating but oddly incomplete. But it seemed that no matter how I approached the task of putting names to faces, I was met with repeated frustration and so I abandoned the searches after seemingly being led down a hall of mirrors; 100-year-old photos of unidentified individuals don't give up their secrets easily. I resumed the search after realizing that a number of the photos contained missed clues that, coupled with some dogged research and a bit of luck, can reveal the subjects' identities and change the way we look at and into them. Working non-linearly with primary and secondary sources (e.g. Federal passenger arrival manifests, contemporary news reporting, transcripts of Special Inquiry hearings, and court documents) has me helped unmask a few of the subjects, revealing some remarkable journeys behind their suspended moments at Ellis Island.[v]
In total, over thirty photos are examined in eleven separate chapters: one photo by Lewis Hine and the rest by Augustus Sherman.
All the stories are, however, fragmentary and not definitive. They're starting points.
Notes
[i] Temple, Andrea, and June F. Tyler. “Ellis Island: A Historical Perspective.” Americans All, 16[ii] Notable exceptions can be found in Mesenhöller's introductory text to his collection of Sherman's work and a chapter in Anna Pegler-Gordon's In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy from 2009. In both cases, however, conclusions on actual identities are not reached.
[iii] Sherman also photographed some of his subjects multiple times, with different configurations, and in different locations. His larger group portraits offer the most revealing examples of such recombinations but are also the most difficult to precisely identify. While I've been successful at unlocking some crucial elements (origin, dates, complete lists of names, purpose of emigration, destinations) of a few of Sherman's group portraits, in most cases it's not possible to match faces to exact names. Four of the chapters below focus on group photos and their related portraits. In all cases, the individuals photographed were either non-immigrant aliens or essentially contract laborers.
[iv] Bogre, Michelle. (2012). Photography as activism: Images for social change. Amsterdam: Focal Press, xii.
[v] Because I had to do quite a bit of detective work in order to unmask the photos, running the risk of making inadvertent errors, I've "shown my work" and the paths taken to the conclusions reached.