We must give a new meaning to the term 'immigration' before we can be sure of always getting in adequate numbers of the best sort of immigrants, those from northern and western Europe. To-day the word 'immigration' is rather commonly associated with the idea of filth and crime and paupers and undesirables generally. If we can cut down the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the term 'immigration' will take on a better meaning. It is the immigrant of northwestern Europe who has settled and built up the country in the past, who best adapts himself to our conditions and who does not lower our standards of living.
—William W. Husband, Commissioner General of Immigration, February 1924¹

From restriction to exclusion

Immigration has long affected how Americans perceive themselves as individuals, their country and the future of each. By 1924, the practical concept and mechanisms of immigration restriction had morphed unmistakably into the practice of immigration exclusion. While the numerical drop in immigration to the U.S. during the WWI era was just starting to rebound, federal legislation was enacted to push the levels back down and redraw the map of immigrant admissibility. Already in place for several years by this time but now drastically expanded, the machinations of the national origins quota era would continue unabated for more than four decades—concealing ethnic and racial prejudice in quantitative categories that reflected an intentionally skewed version of pre-1890 America, minus some people altogether who were "ineligible for citizenship", namely Chinese, Japanese and South Asians.

Sherman's last definitively dated photograph of immigrants at Ellis Island dates from 1921, and Hine's last set of portraits shot on the island, from 1926.² Their work in particular has visually bookended the era of mass migration, capturing and defining the flood of arrivals through "immigrant type" portraits, from peak periods to the beginning of era's nadir. Through this project, I have endeavored to recontextualize key parts of their work at Ellis Island in order to release the identity of their subjects, putting names to faces in well-circulated photographs that concealed both identity and dramatic backstories. Carefully unpacking the visuals that have gone on to define the era of mass migration—establishing how and why they were created and where they were used—can be an important resource to help support a critical visual literacy of the era. Another, largely untapped body of work drawn from identity documents offers a different view and can be used to visually represent the era, but through people, not types. Two separate streams of photos provided the basis for this project which examines how, in a way, settled Americans learned geography through immigration to their land and the imperialism it practiced, particularly via its then 'unincorporated territories' such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico. While each stream may have been distinct, they draw from the same migratory flow of people simply seeking a better life in another part of the world, 100 to 120 years ago.

One group of photos was made by professional and amateur photographers at immigration stations that, because of the near instantaneous and widespread circulation, would go on to visually define the age of mass migration. The strategic deployment of anonymous, "immigrant type" photo portraits of E.W. Austin, J.H. Adams, Augustus Sherman, Julian A. Dimock, and Lewis Hine provided a utility for all sides of the then already long-running "immigration problem", but the motives of these mostly amateur photographers are not as easy to parse as the context into which they were paired. Regardless, their photos continue to visually define the era, as much of their work is now easily accessible and contemporary artists continue to rework and remix the originals. Looking more deeply into both the photographer and their subjects helps contextualize an incredible array of issues, with light refracted from the prism of immigration restriction into the mirror of a cumbersome box camera, to the muted call for "corrections" from Lewis Hine. Establishing subject identity and a fuller context for these iconic photographers' work at Ellis Island makes the individual motives of the photographer less relevant. We simply see, maybe for the first time, the people and the politics in the same breath.

The other group of photos was also made by professional and amateur photographers, but mostly in the home country of the immigrant prior to emigration. These photos formed a crucial part of supplying evidence for the burden of identity in passports and travel documents. They were likely seen only by the studio photographers who took them, immigration officials in home countries and in the U.S. who processed departures/arrivals, and by the immigrants themselves. Eventually, most of the original travel documents would be surrendered to customs officials as immigrants naturalized as U.S. citizens, or they were simply lost or discarded. Copies of passport applications that contain photos and the scattered surviving originals reanimate a more intimate side of immigration, one not ever in the public view. These "identity photographs" can provide a more accurate representation of what the age of mass immigration actually looked like and they are possessed of a unpredictableness, beauty, and visual potency that can shake preconceptions about the era of mass migration. They are often hard to look away from.

Different, yes, but the two bodies of work can be exponentially more powerful and effective when paired with a historically contextualized, fact-based narrative running in parallel. Both sets of photos led me to seek or confirm identity and develop narratives around immigrant lives. However, towards the end of my examinations of Sherman and Hine's Ellis Island work, I discovered that while my questions and motivations were not necessarily novel, answers were out of reach until the digital age. Who might have been asking these questions earlier?

While Lewis Hine's last proposed project titled "Our Strength Is Our People", discussed in chapter 5, was left unrealized before his death in 1940, another New York based photographer in many ways picked up where Hine appeared to be heading with the project, but with clear departures.

In 1939, an energetic and extraordinarily talented member of New York's Photo League named Alexander Alland [Landschaft] was hired by the Russell Sage Foundation to strike new prints of some of Lewis Hine's Ellis Island and child labor portraits. Hine was too ill to complete the request himself and so Alland serendipitously found himself face to face with compelling images that begged rediscovery, including Hine's iconic Italian family looking for lost baggage at Ellis Island and many other powerful but then forgotten works. By this time, Alland was already mastering his own distinctive style of documentary photography—informed by personal biography, experimentation and through commissioned work for the Federal Art Project. Just prior to the U.S. entry into WWII, Alland had achieved a style that would eclipse the ubiquitous "immigrant type" photo portrait approach in representing immigrants as struggling outsiders. While Hine was clearly reaching beyond this approach in some of his work, he was never totally free from it, and this was inevitably even less so for Sherman and many newspaper photographers during the early 1900s.

Alland managed to deliver a much needed new take, one that incorporated identity, photographic and intellectual honesty, and a compassionate eye—and he did it while literally holding Hine's Ellis Island portraits in one hand and Sherman's in another. Decades ahead of his time thematically speaking, Alland's work can be seen as a slightly disconnected bridge to more contemporary representations of ethnic identity through photography, one that intertwines heritage and Americanness in an unambiguous frame.

Alexander Alland at Ellis Island

“And I remembered for 50 years. So I asked permission from the Commissioner of Immigration to allow me to go there and re-photograph. He allowed me to go, providing that I do not remove the pictures. They were embedded in the wall under the glass. I went there. I spent all day and I made copies. There were 36 portraits. Magnificent. I have them downstairs. I can show you."
—Alexander Alland, Ellis Island Oral History Project, 1986³

Born in Sebastopol, Crimea, Alexander Alland arrived at Ellis Island in July 1923 from Istanbul, Türkiye.⁴ He was just 22 years old but by this time had already been a professional photographer for several years, and already an immigrant before he decided to leave Europe for the United States. Desperate to escape in order to avoid conscription into the Russian army, he would finance his emigration by selling his camera(s) and photo equipment, leaving him with just $10 to his name after clearing Ellis Island. Alland described the atmosphere during his processing at the immigration station as “Very sad. Everybody was frightened to death…you didn't know whether you pass or not.” Although Alland’s New World prospects weren’t exactly the brightest—and he would get his initial foothold in New York thanks to assistance from the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society—he was better positioned than many others he was traveling alongside.⁵

By 1923 harsh immigration quota allotments were already in place, with a more extreme version just around the corner, but Alland had secured a visa to enter before leaving Istanbul, something which he acknowledged had helped him avoid overt scrutiny from immigration inspectors. He was processed among Armenian genocide survivors, other young men fleeing (Russian) military conscription, and still others that would today be classified as refugees, not immigrants. Despite his lack of funds, Alland wasn’t detained or held for special inquiry and was likely processed within a few hours. Somewhere along his trek through Ellis Island, he saw a series of wood-framed photo portraits hanging on both sides of some corridor walls in the Main Immigration Building (Great Hall) that depicted immigrant arrivals at the station.

There were four sets encased in glass, each containing nine photos. The photos were Sherman’s and they were in place at Ellis Island from at least 1923 until the early 1940s, perhaps even until the station’s closure in 1954. Only vertical format portraits were used in the displays, no wider angle photos, but they were enlarged (11x14 inch?) and cropped to fit. 25 portraits were of individuals, and nine included 2–5 subjects each; the photos date from between 1904 and 1912 and copies of these prints, all of them, are also part of the William Williams papers, now held by The New York Public Library.⁶

Each of the 36 photos were captioned on engraved brass plaques as follows:

Seeing the portraits made a deep impression on Alland. He must have stopped and studied them closely as he passed through the busy halls in the summer of 1923. He never forgot them and in 1941, almost 20 years after his arrival, he visited Ellis Island again to learn more about the photos. But institutional memory must have been in short supply, so he came back with sketchy info about Sherman; it seems that no one at Ellis Island knew what happened to the negatives or any other prints of his work, or that from the early 1900s until the 1920s, Sherman’s work was prominently featured in the syndicated press, books, periodicals, and three times for National Geographic.⁷

15 years after his death, Sherman was quite literally forgotten, though his portraits would have been seen by thousands of emigrants passing through Ellis Island. Alland remained undeterred by the dead end, as he wasn’t just seeking information. He brought his photo equipment and secured permission to re-photograph the 36 prints, one by one, as they hung on the walls. He had plans for Sherman’s portraits and as photo editor for Common Ground, a quarterly magazine published by the Common Council for American Unity, he supplied a series of Sherman’s portraits to be reproduced in that publication in 1941. Eight of Sherman’s immigrant portraits were included, with the following introduction:

"...[Sherman] photographed people as they came from the four corners of the earth, many in native costume as their holiday best, their faces revealing the fears and hopes they experienced standing on the threshold of a new land. [...] The photographs are nameless studies, identified only by nationality. Many of the subjects may still be alive. The editors are greatly interested in following up on their stories, either through letters from the subjects themselves, should the magazine by good fortune fall into their hands, or from other readers who can supply facts about the subsequent history of these people in the United States."⁸

Alland's work at Ellis Island, now as a U.S. citizen, is the first and most significant attention Sherman’s photographic output had received since his death in 1925, and the only text until the 1980s that specifically addresses Sherman’s work as a photographer. Alland made this happen, and it wasn't the last time he would dig into American's past as captured through the camera. The brief biographical information on Sherman included in the text above isn’t substantially different from what circulates today, e.g. that he was a “Chief Clerk” at Ellis Island and that photography was a hobby. But it also implies that at the time Sherman’s many photo prints and negatives had not been preserved by any federal agencies–or that their whereabouts were simply unknown to current Ellis Island staff at the time of Alland’s intervention. What's amazing here though is the call from the editors, likely led by Alland, to try and collect information about the human subjects of Sherman's photos, something similar to what Hine envisioned in his "Our Strength Is Our People" proposal, but also reflecting an extension of what Alland was already doing among immigrant communities in New York City. Where were these people now?

In an earlier issue of Common Ground, its editors pushed another public call for participation: for recent immigrants to share photographs of themselves and their families with the magazine, which was building up its own photo stock collection documenting immigrant Americans. This collection would be made up of amateur-shot photos, or photos used in identity documents, that were initially curated by the subjects themselves—offering immigrant Americans the opportunity to be seen as they preferred to be seen. Alland received the submissions, with the aim of "build[ing] up a file of pictorial material, important historically in preserving America in transition....to be able to fill a long felt need in the U.S. for a Photograph and Library and Exchange that can make available to other periodical organizations, and book publishers this kind of material.”⁹ It remains unclear as to the success of the project, but in a very real way, the editors were looking for a new way to represent immigrant communities through voluntary rather than imposed depictions.

By the time Alland was interviewed in 1986 for the Ellis Island Oral History Project, he was apparently unaware that hundreds more photos by Sherman existed, some of which had been donated to NPS and the Ellis Island History Museum. Still, his memory of what he first saw in 1923, then again in 1941 had not diminished.

Sometime after their removal from Ellis Island, the frames were dismantled and Sherman's prints were taken to the Manhattan Immigration and Naturalization Service at 20 West Broadway in New York City. They were reframed for display in public(?) corridors for decades. Despite the murkiness of Sherman's life, this set of photos just couldn't be warehoused. In 1978, the sets were donated to the Ellis Island History Museum, accessioned and eventually removed from their frames—back to where they originally were captured and displayed for decades.

Alland's America

"When the laws of the land are lived up to, and there are no barriers to keep people apart, no individual benefits more than the whole community benefits...for ability is not the privilege of one race or one nationality, but a gift shared by all. [...] I have tried to show clearly and distinctly the differences and the similarity among Americans of many national and racial backgrounds: differences in the physical appearance, customs, and cultural backgrounds; similarity in the desire for happiness, prosperity, and liberty that we all hold as an American ideal."
—Alexander Alland, American Counterpoint¹⁰

During the same year that he photographed Sherman’s work in 1941, Alland started what would become a five-year quest to locate the original glass-plate negatives of another amateur photographer (and muckraker), Jacob A. Riis, who had deep interest in New York's immigrant communities. Alland was successful and eventually produced a monograph on Riis, incorporating his own prints of Riis’ work and developing a touring exhibit, similar, in part, to what he was attempting to do with Sherman’s work. During the 1940s, Alland also acquired huge sets of forgotten works by other New York-based photographers, including Robert L. Bracklow and Jessie Tarbox Beals, so it’s quite conceivable that he might have done the same with Sherman’s work, had he achieved more success in locating additional source material.¹¹

Besides the detective work Alland took up in pursuit of long lost photographic fragments of America’s recent (immigrant) past, he was also busy taking photos of chronically overlooked, “ethnic” communities in New York. In 1943, he published “American Counterpoint”, a photographic deep dive into hyphenated America that celebrated “common citizenship”, and quickly became a bestseller.¹²

An immigrant himself, migration proved to be a lens that would shape Alland's understanding of the U.S. and heavily inform much of his photographic work, which was made primarily during the tail end of the Great Depression through the WWII era. Though Alland was active as a photographer for over two decades in the U.S. and brilliantly tackled different subject matter, his hundreds of portraits of immigrant Americans and minorities stand out and reflect a sea-change in the way immigrants were represented in the popular press. Alland wasn't alone in taking this approach, but he seemed to possess a unique, all-access pass to different settled immigrant and minority communities in New York City, allowing him to embed among Romani, Arab, Indian, Italian, Armenian, Afro Caribbean, Turkish, Hungarian, Czech, Chinese, Mexican and Korean Americans, American Indians [Mohawk], "Ethiopian Hebrews" (hailing from African-American Jewish Congregations in Harlem)—Americans with some sixty separate (original) nationalities. Somewhat reminiscent of Hine's later work at Ellis Island, Alland's striking portraits showed a more positive, even hopeful side of what was going on with immigrants after they arrived in the U.S. Unlike Hine, however, Alland focused less on labor, struggle, and striff and more on domestic life, education (Americanization and "Americanism"), rituals (faith, worship, marriage, death), play, and leisure activities. The range of people Alland photographed in New York was breathtaking and included people that fell outside the margins set by the 1924 Immigration Act, which was still very much in force by the early 1940s. This included people still "ineligible for citizenship" because their race, (Japanese and South Asian immigrants), people from little understood religious backgrounds that face/faced discrimination globally (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu), persecuted minority populations (African American, Latino, Romani), people who were about to be interned in concentration camps (Japanese Americans), as well as people who descended from early Northern and Western Europe colonists. Leading off the collection was a man proudly proclaiming: "Sure, I'm an American! My people came here from Siberia maybe ten, maybe twenty-five thousand years ago. Sure, they were immigrants too! If you ask me, you're all pretty recent arrivals. I'm what you call an American Indian, but I'd rather be called just American, like the rest of you."¹³

While other photographers fleetingly captured "immigrant types" during the early 1900s as alien interlopers about to descend upon already established communities, or tired and desperate masses fleeing old world misery, Alland gave a visual blueprint of an ethnically and racially integrated America, an America that he believed in.

Alland walked past Sherman's portraits and couldn't look away, couldn't forget. It took him almost two decades, and though his access was limited to under 40 images, Alland realized the historic and cultural value embedded in Sherman's portraits, much as people the world over do today with his and Hine's work. But Alland didn't exactly emulate Sherman's work or interpret them in the way most contemporary commentators do. Bonnie Yochelson gives some clues on this in her introduction for a museum catalog of a 1991 posthumous retrospective of Alland's work, "He [Alland] was not an advocate of a 'melting pot', but rather of a 'mosaic' in which immigrants aspired to the norms and comforts of middle-class life while retaining the traditions of their native cultures."¹⁴

Sherman likely never saw his subjects outside of Ellis Island, and Hine focused on both the immigrant's landing and their subsequent labor struggles, not domestic life, and never got to realize his "Our Strength Is Our People" project. Alland decided to photograph just that, life, American life—as its past and future in one breath, a flawed but beautiful patchwork.

Notes:

¹ NORTH EUROPE FOLKS FAVORED BY COMMISSIONER GENERAL OF IMMIGRATION W.W. HUSBAND - HE SUPPORTS JOHNSON BILL The Barre Daily Times Barre, Vermont 09 Feb 1924, Saturday, Page 3

² Sherman's last dated photo is titled 'Galician Woman', and captioned on the verso: "Arrived June 22, 1921, on S.S. 'Rotterdam'. Native of Polish Galicia" but the subject is not identifiable. The only known print is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hine's last series of portraits at Ellis Island date from 1926, some of which were later assembled for portfolios commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1938, just before Alland was hired to strike new prints of Hine's work.

³ Alland, Alexander. “Interview of Alexander Alland by Edward Applebome.” Ellis Island Oral History Project, Series AKRF, no. 0185, 03. June, 1986.

⁴ "New York Passenger Arrival Lists (Ellis Island), 1892-1924", FamilySearch, Entry for Alexander Landschaft, 1923. Available via FamilySearch.

⁵ Alland, Alexander. “Interview of Alexander Alland by Edward Applebome.” Ellis Island Oral History Project, Series AKRF, no. 0185, 03. June, 1986.

⁶ Approximately 50 of Sherman's prints are were kept by Williams, who served as Ellis Island Commissioner from 1902-1905 and 1909-1913. The 36 framed portraits that hung at Ellis Island are identical to 36 mounted portraits that are included in NYPL's William Williams Papers. The photographs overlap with Williams' terms, likely indicating that the selection and effort to place them at Ellis Island was Williams' initiative. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also owns over 50 of Sherman's prints, 20 of which (not including duplicates) are part of the same selection as the Williams papers and in the collection photographed by Alland at Ellis Island. The overlap among these collections is likely not coincidental and reflects the fact that the 36 prints were actually a sort of selective canon of "immigrant types."

⁷ A 1917 article also featured 36 photographs, 11 of which were part of the framed sets. See: "Our foreign-born Citizens."National Geographic 31, No. 2 (1917): 95-130. Available via Internet Archive.

⁸ “Threshold of a New Land”, Common Ground, Summer 1941. 64-72.

⁹ Adamic, Louis [Alojzij Adamič]. “Photographs of New Americans”, Common Ground, Spring 1941. 63-64.

¹⁰ Alland, Alexander. 1943. American Counterpoint. New York: John Day Company. 142, 147

¹¹ Alland indicated that he unsuccessfully attempted to locate Sherman's original glass plate negatives during the early 1940s. See: Yochelson, Bonnie, Alexander Alland, and Museum of the City of New York. 1991. The Committed Eye : Alexander Alland’s Photography. New York: Museum of the City of New York. 18.

¹² Alland, Alexander. 1943. American Counterpoint. New York: John Day Company. The book only went through one printing, due to manditory paper rationing during WWII, and was never reprinted.

¹³ Ibid, 18.

¹⁴ Yochelson, Bonnie, Alexander Alland, and Museum of the City of New York. 1991. The Committed Eye : Alexander Alland’s Photography. New York: Museum of the City of New York. 11.