ART REVIEW : Coming to America : Photographic Exhibition Depicts 140 Years of Immigration

“Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers,” an unusually cogent and timely exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts, lays out the previously untold story of photographs that record 140 years of immigration to America from nearly every continent in the world. Mildly offered as wanting to expand public discussion on a currently volatile topic, the show, in its heart of hearts, is actually polemical. American immigration is OK, this exhibition says, and here is a mountain of compelling photographic evidence to prove it.

MOPA Director Arthur Ollman and guest curator Vicki Goldberg, a photography critic for the New York Times, trace the subject in 189 pictures. The photographs date from the 1850s, after the camera itself traveled to the United States from European shores, to the present day.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the show is that it has taken on a vast, enormously complicated and politically and emotionally charged subject and has nonetheless managed to give it a coherent and accessible shape. “A Nation of Strangers” is thoroughly persuasive in demonstrating that not only is today’s polarized struggle over immigration far from unique but that immigration is itself vital to understanding our American-ness.

The show is organized roughly chronologically, beginning with two daguerreotypes from the 1850s. One is a resplendent formal portrait in a red velvet case of a prosperous-looking Mrs. Mordecai Manuel, a Jewish immigrant to Massachusetts from England, by Rufus Anson. The other, by William Shew, records the arduous labor of “Gold Mining With Chinese Workers,” presumably in California. Together, they imply the enormous breadth of U.S. immigration.

Immigration to this continent didn’t begin in the 1850s, of course, but started instead with the first migrations from Asia over the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. The show opens with a few engravings and lithographs, some of which predate the 1839 invention of photography, that depict aspects of American immigration that the camera couldn’t, including the forced arrival of African slaves. Broadsheets and newspaper accounts scattered throughout the galleries also afford a running commentary on immigration as America grew.

But finally this is the story of American immigration photography, and pictures are the thing here. The curators sifted through thousands of images, at immigration sites like New York’s Ellis Island and San Francisco’s Angel Island, in state historical archives around the country, in newspaper morgues (including The Times’) and in museum and private collections.

They faced simple but daunting questions. How can one always know for sure that the people pictured in a photograph actually are immigrants? To what degree is this photographic representation class-bound, since wealthier immigrants can more easily control their image than can the middle-class or, especially, the poor?

Goldberg’s incisive, groundbreaking essay in the show’s catalogue establishes an exceptionally useful organizing principle for understanding the motivations and uses of immigration photography. It will probably become a standard guide for future studies of the genre.

The curator proposes that most such images represent one of four types: arrival pictures, which document the immigrant’s landing on American shores; success pictures, which mean to show how the immigrant has flourished in his or her adopted country; preservation pictures, which seek to record home customs in an effort to keep them intact for future generations, while inevitably evoking their transformation; and, finally, photojournalism, which pictures the varied social interactions of immigrants, often as part of a social crusade. Looking at the 189 photographs in the show with these loose, often overlapping types in mind helps make sense of an otherwise unwieldy subject.

Lewis W. Hine’s earnest “Albanian Woman, Ellis Island” (circa 1905), for example, reads as a touching silver-print portrait of a young immigrant woman portrayed as a kind of secular Madonna. She’s about to be reborn into another life, where salvation from human misery is the promise and the dream.

As an arrival picture, it couldn’t be more different from Alex Webb’s “Arrest, San Ysidro, California” (1979). The crisply colored Cibachrome of a luscious, Oz-like landscape shows a helicopter hovering over the INS arrest of three young men, thwarted in an illegal attempt to realize a similar over-the-rainbow aspiration.

Many of the pictures in the show were made, not surprisingly, by anonymous photographers. In addition to Hine and Webb, there are also pictures by a number of well-known artists.

The personal campaign by police reporter Jacob Riis to expose the tenement squalor of New York in the 1880s and 1890s is stingingly represented. Dorothea Lange’s “Braceros” (circa 1938) is a powerful image of a Mexican worker, who leans into the bright sunlight from the window of a train transporting him to the produce fields of California. Even Ansel Adams is included, with a still life of memorabilia belonging to the Yonemitsu family, who were interred at the Manzanar relocation camp during World War II.

Unknown to me before this exhibition, however, is Augustus Sherman, a gifted amateur who worked at Ellis Island and who, on his own, took arrival pictures between 1892 and 1925, by far the most active period of immigration in U.S. history. His pictures of three stoic women from Guadeloupe, French West Indies; of two apprehensive Russian children looking anxiously around and of three slightly bewildered Dutch women in regional costume anticipate something of the indexical quality that the great August Sander brought to his ambitious project to create an atlas of German types from all levels of the social strata. The 10 Sherman photographs are the second-largest number by any photographer in the show, and they make an impressive group.

“A Nation of Strangers” is an adept historical anchor to the ambitious three-part “Points of Entry” exhibition. Part two, subtitled “Reframing America” and organized at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., examines the careers of seven notable photographers who were trained in Europe before emigrating to the United States; part three, “Tracing Cultures,” was assembled at the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco and surveys recent work by living artists who examine their own cultural heritage. The three shows will rotate among the consortium of organizing venues between now and March, before beginning a national tour.

The one small misstep in “A Nation of Strangers” is its tone of polite cautiousness. As politicians posture in the camera’s glare, fanning the fires of xenophobic sentiment for personal gain, a frank assertion of its pro-immigration position would have made this otherwise persuasive show even more powerful than it already is.

* Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 239-5262, through Nov. 5. Closed Mondays.