Images of Immigration : Photography museums in San Diego, San Francisco and Tucson have created ‘Points of Entry,’ a three-part exhibition of the struggles faced by different peoples who have come to America.

The image remains as relevant now as it was in 1926: Here, in black and white, are 23 armed and grinning agents of the new U.S. Border Patrol, standing watch over some barren landscape linking Mexico with Texas.

That this confrontational photograph came 68 years before Proposition 187 and the presidential candidacy of Gov. Pete Wilson is little surprise to Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts here. When Ollman began gathering pictures like this one four years ago for the museum’s upcoming “Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers” exhibition, immigration was hardly a dormant issue in America.

At the time the show was conceived, angry locals were periodically gathering on the northern side of the San Diego/Tijuana border to shine their headlights on anyone crossing illegally. Not long after that, on the other side of the country, there were the sagas of heavily laden and highly risky rafts floating toward the U.S. from Cuba and Haiti. And at ports on both coasts, ships overloaded with Chinese immigrants were being intercepted.

“The enterprise of accepting immigrants into the U.S. has never been easy,” says Ollman, the grandson of Ukrainian immigrants. “It’s often unpopular, but it is always profitable in the end. And there are always nativists who seek to claim political power by closing the doors, with scapegoating and scare tactics.”

The museum’s show, which opens Tuesday and continues through Nov. 5, is a survey of documentary photography of the sometimes grim, often triumphant immigrant experience in America. It is also the first of a three-part series of exhibitions under the “Points of Entry” banner, created in an unusual coalition with two other photography museums: the Friends of Photography in San Francisco and Tucson’s Center for Creative Photography.

Each of the institutions focused on a different aspect of immigration for its shows, all of which will tour to each of the three museums before traveling nationally as a group, making a stop at the Smithsonian Institution in November, 1996. The San Francisco exhibition focuses on the internal struggles over culture and identity of 12 contemporary artists, while Tucson gathered a collection of mid-century photography from artists who saw the country through foreign eyes.

The partnership was made possible by a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the largest private arts granting agency in the country, to encourage mid-sized organizations to join forces for a project too big for any of them to undertake individually.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was fun,” says Andy Grundberg, director of the Friends of Photography. The overall subject, he adds, “was pretty fascinating and engaging. I was curious about how art might reflect the kind of social fabric that we have here.”

What emerges is further evidence of the perpetual friction that comes with unexpected and continued diversity in language, religion, music, culture and personal appearance.

“About the only thing that was truly recurrent was the animus against immigrants,” says New York Times photography critic Vicki Goldberg, who co-curated the San Diego show with Ollman. “What’s going on today is absolutely not new. This country has always wanted to pull up the gangplank as soon as they got here. People seem to forget that many of the people who are the most aggravated are children of immigrants. It’s gone on since at least the mid-19th Century.”

According to a speech Ollman discovered during his research, even Benjamin Franklin complained, in the 1790s, about the huge influx of Germans into Pennsylvania; he was alarmed by their religious practices, poor English skills and use of public health and education dollars.

The earliest photographs in the show come from 1850: daguerreotypes of Chinese gold miners and an image of two Jewish women just arrived from England.

“By that time there were families who had been here for 10 generations,” Ollman says. Photography hadn’t been invented at the time of the landing at Plymouth Rock, so many who came from England, Germany, Ireland and elsewhere “were not documented in their immigrant form,” he says. “We have no photographs of them as arrivals.”

That absence is balanced by the volumes of documentary work that have come since--from Jacob Riis’ photographs of the terrible slum conditions faced by 19th-Century immigrants in New York to Alex Webb’s rich color images of immigrant communities and failed border crossings. The exhibition also borrows heavily from the collections of the nation’s state historical societies, and from staff photographers at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Miami Herald and elsewhere.

Among the Museum of Photographic Arts’ 204 works is Leonard Freed’s quiet 1994 image of Asian children studying in a Wisconsin classroom, watched over by the usual portraits of Washington and Lincoln.

“It’s interesting to understand these different cultures in order to measure our own possibilities,” says Freed, the son of Russian immigrants, and a member of Magnum Photos, the prestigious news photography agency co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I’m interested in people, and how they all fit together.”

“What I’m hoping is that we will see that the fellow climbing under the border fence last week might well be very much the story of our own ancestor,” says Ollman.

That difficulty takes more conceptual forms at the San Francisco show, titled “Points of Entry: Tracing Cultures,” which arrives in San Diego on Nov. 14. Among the works are artist Carrie Mae Weems’ barren pictures of old slave-shipping ports on the Ivory Coast, where some ancestors of African Americans were first separated from their homelands.

In the same show is Korean American Young Kim’s “Distances #7,” which includes a panel that reads: “As my English gets better, my Korean gets worse.”

“The work that I really liked gave me a sense of the complexity of cultural adjustment, that it entails loss as much as it does benefit,” Grundberg says. “It’s about a certain kind of negotiation between the way things are supposed to be and what the real life experience is like.”

At Tucson’s Center for Creative Photography, “Points of Entry: Reframing America” focuses on work by seven immigrant artists--among them Robert Frank and Lisette Model--whose expressive, often biting images of America revolutionized Americans’ images of themselves.

“There’s a real strong sense of class, which I think was a revelation to Americans,” says curator Terence Pitts, who is director of the Tucson museum. “They pretty much all saw the social situation here as a lot more serious. They really paid attention to racism.”

Grundberg says he hopes people will come away from the shows realizing that “the way they’ve heard politicians talk about immigration has made it seem a lot simpler than it really is. There’s a real human face to the whole story that hasn’t been told.”

For its part, the Museum of Photographic Arts will actively promote that story via a community outreach program that includes a citizenship ceremony at the museum on Sept. 22. To Ollman, this current era of anguish over the continuing influx of immigrants is just part of the endless ebb and flow of the country’s struggle with its identity.

“The complexion of America is darkening, and there are a lot of people who are very uptight about that,” says Ollman, speaking across a desk scattered with a week’s worth of foreign-language newspapers published in the United States. But, he adds, “It feels good to get back to a real issue again, a real hard hitting human issue that’s on the front pages a lot. Photographs can initiate a lot of this discussion.”

* “Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers” opens Tuesday and continues through Nov. 5 at the Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego; call (619) 239-5262. “Tracing Cultures” will be at the museum Nov. 14-Jan . 7 and “Reframing America” Jan. 16-March 10.