...it may be pointed out that the number and variety of people from all quarters of Europe, with some from Asia and Africa, many of them most interesting and with customs varying widely from our own, who annually come to Ellis Island for inspection under the immigration law, result in making this a great human nature office, with a long list of comedies and tragedies, and an office very interesting to administer.
—William Williams, Ellis Island Commissioner, December 1912¹

Representation matters

Adopting an 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 long-standing visual ubiquity of their work. Though the photos endure, more widely seen than ever before, comparatively little has been written about the lives captured on Sherman and Hine's hundreds of surviving gelatin silver prints.²

Peter Mesenhöller's collection of Sherman's work includes portraits of mostly anonymous individuals that at first glance appear to be immigrants but also many that, given the restrictive immigration laws and inspection regimes in play, could have faced immediate debarment.³ Realizing this made me curious about the intentions behind Sherman's work (was he just looking for interesting faces and costumes?) and wonder even more about the identities of his subjects. Who were they? What became of them? I wouldn't get anywhere without their names, a detail Sherman rarely recorded. 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 a number of Sherman's portraits after subjecting them to some scrutiny. Eventually, I met with success in identifying a number of individuals or broadly defining group portraits.⁴

In total, over thirty photos are examined in twelve separate chapters: one photo by Lewis Hine and the rest by Augustus Sherman.⁵ In each case, I started with unreliable data points, conflicting details, and zero personal names. The photos I researched were chosen partly because I was most curious about the subjects in the frame and partly because I thought I had a chance at revealing their identities. I went where the research took me and found the slowly-evolving stories stunning and not at all what I expected.

None of the subjects' names were ever revealed by the photographers, and their identities, to the best of my knowledge, ever subsequently studied by researchers or photo historians. All the stories are, however, fragmentary and not definitive. They're starting points.⁶

Notes

¹ Rules for the U.S. Immigrant Station at Ellis Island, 1911 Casefile 52516/1-B. [December 1912; February, March 1913.] ; Revision of Ellis Island, its organization and some of its work; United States Bureau of Immigration. Reproduced in Unrau, Harlan D., and United States National Park Service. 1984. Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty National Monument, [Volume II] New York-New Jersey. [Washington, D.C.]: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service. Available via HathiTrust.

² Sherman's work is extensively discussed in the following:

• Sherman, Augustus F., and Peter Mesenhöller. 2005. August F. Sherman: Ellis Island portraits, 1905-1920. New York: Aperture.
• Baur, Joachim. 2015. Die Musealisierung der Migration Einwanderungsmuseen und die Inszenierung der multikulturellen Nation. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
• Dolmage, Jay. 2018. Disabled upon arrival: eugenics, immigration, and the construction of race and disability. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
• Pegler-Gordon, Anna. 2009. In sight of America: photography and the development of U.S. immigration policy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

³ Sherman, Augustus F., and Peter Mesenhöller. 2005. August F. Sherman: Ellis Island portraits, 1905-1920. New York: Aperture.

⁴ 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. Five of the chapters below focus on group photos and their related portraits. In all but one case, the individuals photographed were either non-immigrant aliens or essentially contract laborers.

⁵ Obviously, I had more success in unmasking Sherman's work compared to Hine's. The reason for the lopsided focus has to do with the widespread deployment of Sherman's Ellis Island portraits during the early 1900s. Each instance of use provided new clues and there were simply far more of these for Sherman's work than for Hine's.

⁶ Besides the widespread, syndicated deployment of Sherman and Hine's Ellis Island portraits in press and publications from the 1900s to 1920s, copies of their work (photo prints, glass plate negatives, and lantern slides) have been kept or acquired by various institutions, including:

• National Parks Service (NPS) Most of its collection of 200+ prints by Augustus Sherman came from Sherman's niece, Mary Sherman Peters, who likely inherited the material from Sherman's estate after his death in 1925; she kept the collection for over 40 years and eventually donated it to NPS in 1969. Apart from this, approximately 30 of Sherman's prints hung as framed portraits at Ellis Island from at least the 1920s on. After Ellis Island's closing in 1954, these portraits made their way to the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service at 20 W. Broadway in lower Manhattan, where they were displayed until the 1970s. In 1978, they were donated to NPS/Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.
• The New York Public Library (Ellis Island prints from both Sherman and Hine)
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (Ellis Island prints from both Sherman and Hine)
• The New-York Historical Society, Alexander Alland Photograph Collection; in addition, Alland collected over 50 prints of Sherman's work that were later donated to NPS/Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.
• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, National Anthropological Archives (prints)
• American Museum of Natural History (colorized lantern slides)
• Brown Brothers Photo Archive (now defunct, but owned some of Sherman's original glass plate negatives)
• Methodist Church Board of Missions (prints and lantern slides from both Sherman and Hine)
• Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church (lantern slides, stereopticon lectures)