PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN AGENT OF U.S. STATE POWER: 

PRODUCING AND COLLECTING IMAGES FOR SURVEILLANCE OF 

“UNDESIRABLE” IMMIGRANTS IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY 

By 

Anthony J. Cepak 

A THESIS 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

Submitted to 

for the degree of 

Journalism – Master of Arts 

2018 

ABSTRACT 

PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN AGENT OF U.S. STATE POWER: 

PRODUCING AND COLLECTING IMAGES FOR SURVEILLANCE OF 

“UNDESIRABLE” IMMIGRANTS IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY 

By 

Anthony J. Cepak 

This thesis reexamines the historical visual narrative of early 20th century immigration in 

the United States investigating the contributions made by photographers Lewis Wickes Hine and 

Augustus F. Sherman, and immigration officials William Williams and John R. Robinson. 

Though widely accepted as the visual record of early 20th century immigration, the Ellis Island 

work of Hine was in direct conversation with the work of amateur photographer Sherman. 

Compared to Hine’s egalitarian perspective of immigrants, Sherman’s photographs provide a 

narrower, darker view of immigration by focusing on representation of those classified 

“undesirable” upon arrival due to health, religion, culture, race or ethnicity. While Sherman’s 

work was largely forgotten over time, Hine’s work endured to create a visual mythology that 

elicits nostalgia of Ellis Island as the celebrated entry point for millions of white Europeans. 

Hine’s work as a documentarian is compared to the topological portraiture Sherman made which 

illustrates the exclusionary nature of his body of work. As agents of state power, Williams and 

Robinson collected photographs of undesirable immigrants that also construct a dark and narrow 

view of immigration. Comparing and contrasting the activities of these four actors builds an 

argument that photographs illustrating race and ethnicity were methodically produced and 

collected to categorize ethnic and racial types and surveil undesirable immigrants.  

Copyright by 
ANTHONY J. CEPAK 
2018 

To my amazing wife and daughter, for tolerating the late hours, weekends away at the 

library and all the sacrifice made in order for this to happen. Stephanie and Morgan without the 
love, laughter and support you have given selflessly, along with the daily reminders that I need to 
finish writing, this thesis would not have been possible. Also, to my parents, Frank and Becky, 
for somehow always knowing that I would get to this point and for always believing in me.   

iv 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

First and foremost, I need to acknowledge and thank my thesis committee, in particular 

my chair, Professor Howard Bossen, who throughout this project kept me from wandering astray 

and demonstrated the utmost patience and firmness that are characteristic of a truly great mentor. 

And to Professors Anna Pegler-Gordon and Michael Stamm, thank you for all the guidance and 

support; your insights, suggestions and feedback have been invaluable. All of you challenged me 

to go deeper and ultimately made this thesis better than I could have ever imagined. For giving 

so generously of your time, even over the summer and winter breaks, to help me to completion, I 

owe you a tremendous amount of gratitude.  

Thank you to the California Historical Society, New York Public Library, Ellis Island 

Museum and especially to the park ranger on Angel Island that drove me back to the dock just in 

time to catch the last ferry back to San Francisco.  

Finally, I want to acknowledge the Michigan State University College of Communication 

Arts and Sciences. The college’s summer research fellowship partially funded my travel to San 

Francisco and New York to collect the original source material used for analysis in this thesis.  

v 

PREFACE 

Both Angel Island and Ellis Island hold tremendous significance in the historical narrative of 

immigration and this preface serves as a brief historical overview of their operation. Positioned 

on opposite coasts of the continental United States, their physical distance from one another is 

symbolic of the distance between their two legacies in history. It is at these two places where the 

figures central to the argument of this thesis carried out their activities of making and collecting 

photographs of immigrants in the early 20th century.    

Ellis Island opened for operation as an immigration station under the newly formed U.S. 

Immigration Bureau in 1892. After a fire destroyed the first timber frame building, a new 

building—the iconic Renaissance Revival structure that now holds designation as a U.S. Historic 

Landmark—was constructed and opened for operation in 1900. Geographically closer to the 

shore of New Jersey than New York, the island in its current form is nearly unrecognizable from 

when immigration processing was transferred there from the aging Castle Garden station at the 

lower tip of Manhattan. What would come to be known as Ellis Island was originally called 

“Kioshk” (Gull) Island by the Hackensack and Tappan tribes that lived along the Hudson River 

prior to Dutch and English colonization.1 Dutch settlers renamed the 3.3-acre plot that barely 

rose above the waters of New York Harbor, Little Oyster Island because its shallow shores were 

home to rich oyster beds. As ownership of the island changed, so did its name. Throughout its 

history, it was also known as Dyre Island, Bucking Island and Anderson’s Island. By 1813, the 

island was under lease to the U.S. Department of War and home to a military installation 

called Fort Gibson (Figure 1). During its stint as a mortar base it was renamed Ellis Island after 

its last private owner, merchant Samuel Ellis.  The island was eventually deeded to the federal 

vi 

government and in 1890 U.S. President Benjamin Harrison declared it to be the site for the first  

federal immigration station.2 Six decades of operation as an immigration station had a profound 

physical effect on the tiny island. As the need for capacity rose, the island’s geography was 

altered and expanded using landfill several times. What began as a 3.3-acre island grew at the 

hands of man to its final footprint of 27.5 acres at present. A series of glass-encased dioramas at 

the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration chronicles the expansion of both the island and 

its facilities over time.    

For 12 million immigrants fleeing conflict, persecution, famine or oppression, Ellis Island 

was the terminus of an arduous, and physically, psychologically and emotionally exhausting 

journey.3,4 But simply making it there was no guarantee of a new life in the United States. For 

some, largely depending on social class, the intake process at Ellis Island was smooth and short 

in duration.5 For others, it involved in-depth interrogations and sometimes intrusive physical 

examinations aimed at determining if arrivals would spread disease or end up a “burden on 

society.”6 A 1907 photograph of doctors examining a group of Jewish immigrants (Figure 2) for 

example, illustrates the sometimes intrusive and demeaning nature of these examinations. The 

immigrants are shown, stripped of their shirts and being examined by physicians wearing 

military style uniforms. Also consider the headline of one newspaper article (Figure 3), which 

describes the inspection process at Ellis Island as “putting our immigrants through the sieve” 

suggesting the need for the masses to be sorted and categorized. Of the immigrants processed at 

Ellis Island, more than more than 2.4 million experienced detainments, in some cases lasting 

weeks, and more than 300,000 were rejected based on their classification of being undesirable 

and were deported back to the homes they fled.7 Augustus F. Sherman made 

vii 

photographs of immigrants and William Williams collected those photographs while working at 

Ellis Island, so as a place, the immigration station had an influence on their activities.  

Just as Ellis Island as a place is important to the following narrative, so too is the setting for 

the other collection examined in this thesis—a collection made by John A. Robinson at Angel 

Island in San Francisco. On the beach of a shallow alcove on the island’s northern shore, a small 

compound is situated at the base of Mt. Livermore, which rises 788 feet above the San Francisco 

Bay, to the summit in the center of the island. Out of view from San Francisco, across the bay 

sits what remains of the U.S. Immigration Station at Angel Island. Though often referred to as 

the Ellis Island of the west, Angel Island’s history and enduring legacy is far from that of its 

storied counterpart in New York Harbor. Unlike Ellis Island, which processed and granted 

entrance to millions of European immigrants during its 60 years of operation as a U.S. 

immigration station, Angel Island was built almost exclusively for the purpose of detainment and 

deportation of mainly Asian immigrants.8 The U.S. immigration station at Angel Island was 

commissioned to replace the ad hoc system of processing that took place on steamships docked 

along the San Francisco Wharf. The station was also to serve as replacement of the ill-equipped, 

temporary detention center located at the tip of Pier 40, where conditions were described as 

“unbearable misery…lacking in every facility for cleanliness and decency…”9 In this regard, 

Angel Island was commissioned to serve two functions; processing those trying to re-enter the 

United States through San Francisco, as well as detaining immigrants ineligible for naturalization 

or suspected of crimes that were rounded up for deportation.  

From its opening in 1910, the immigration station at Angel Island was mired in controversy, 

from claims that the station was not much improvement over Pier 40 in terms of capacity and 

facilities and that its secluded location made it difficult for witnesses to appear during 

viii 

deportation examinations. The functions and criticisms of Angel Island differed from Ellis 

Island, even though the processes put in place, even the “cottage” concept of design, were 

modeled after the station’s counterpart in the east.10 Just as Ellis Island provides the backdrop for 

the Sherman photographs, and their collection by Williams, Angel Island and the Asian 

immigrants it was commissioned to detain, provides context in considering why John A. 

Robinson collected the photographs he did while working as an immigration inspector in San 

Francisco.  

Both Ellis Island and Angel Island offer up illusions to those who visit, but those illusions are 

different, which is why historically and anthropologically the two are often discussed separately. 

For Ellis Island, the illusion is that it is symbolic of a celebrated culture of blended immigrant 

heritage. Millions of visitors each year visit the national landmark and find their ancestors names 

etched on the wall of remembrance, not fully aware of the dark context surrounding the 

experience of hundreds of thousands of Europeans due to the region of the continent from which 

they hailed. This illusion is what Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot would describe 

as the “ignorance of our own history.”11 For Angel Island, the illusion is that it is comparable to 

Ellis Island, where 12 million immigrants were granted entrance to the United States. Angel 

Island was not so much a processing center, as it was a prison—a holding place for immigrants 

arriving to be detained for sometimes months, only to be sent back from where they came never 

fulfilling their share of an American Dream. It is these islands of illusion that provide the 

backdrop to the following discussion.   

ix 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................... xi 

CHAPTER ONE: CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL ATTITUDES TOWARD 
IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES ............................................................................. 1 
  INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 
  ESTABLISHING THE CONTEXT FOR THIS THESIS ..................................................... 6 
  ATTITUDES TOWARD IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES ............................. 9 
  PHOTOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION ............................................................. 15 

CHAPTER TWO: METHODS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS ......................................... 21 
  ASSIGNING MEANING TO HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS ....................................... 22 
  DESCRIBING AND INTERPRETING PHOTOGRAPHS ................................................ 24 

CHAPTER 3: RACE, NATIVISM AND POLICY: TOWARD THE EXCLUSION OF 
UNDESIRABLE IMMIGRANTS ............................................................................................. 28 
 CAPITALISM AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY .............................................. 30 
  “NEW IMMIGRANTS” AND THE RISE OF NATAVIST VIEWPOINTS ...................... 33 
PHOTOGRAPHS AS RACIAL TOPOLOGY .................................................................36 
 ACTS OF EXCLUSION: IMMIGRATION POLICY 1900–1924 .................................... 39 

CHAPTER FOUR: THE AGENT AND THE IMAGE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND SURVEILANCE 
IN U.S. IMMIGRATION .......................................................................................................... 42 
 AUGUSTUS F. SHERMAN ............................................................................................ 44 
 COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHS FOR SURVEILENCE ................................................ 46 
 JOHN A. ROBINSON ..................................................................................................... 47 
 WILLIAM WILLIAMS ................................................................................................... 51 
 DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................. 53 
 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 59 

APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................ 62 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 90  

x 

LIST OF FIGURES 

Figure 1. Fort Gibson, Ellis Island Foundation. ....................................................................... 63 

Figure 2. Underwood & Underwood, c. 1907, Physicians examining a group of Jewish 

immigrants, Library of Congress SSF - Emigration and Immigration – Ellis Island, N.Y. .. 64 

Figure 3. Library of Congress SSF - Emigration and Immigration............................................ 65 

Figure 4. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1911, Guadeloupian Woman, Ellis Island, New 

York, New York, 9 1/8  x 6 s7/8 inches (24 x 17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, 
Augustus Sherman photographs, ca. 1905–1914, William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and 
Archives Division, New York Public Library. .................................................................... 66 

Figure 5. Unknown, French, c.1793, Madame Roland (née Jeanne Marie Philipon en 1754) est 

guillotine. .......................................................................................................................... 67 

Figure 6. Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1905, Italian Family En Route To Ellis Island, Ellis 
Island, New York, New York, Ellis Island, scenes and personalities, the Miriam and Ira D. 
Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York 
Public Library. .................................................................................................................. 68 

Figure 7. Empire State Building and lower Manhattan. ............................................................ 69 

Figure 8. Empire State Building. .............................................................................................. 69 

Figure 9. Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1911, Breaker Boys in Coal Mine, South Pittston, 

Pennsylvania, silver gelatin print. ..................................................................................... 70 

Figure 10. Puck Magazine (USA) Aug 9, 1899. Opper Project Archives, The Ohio State 

University, Cartoon Research Library. .............................................................................. 71 

Figure 11. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 ..... 72 

Figure 12. March, 4, 1919, Opper Project Archives, The Ohio State University, Cartoon 

Research Library............................................................................................................... 73 

Figure 13. National Geographic, Jan. 1905, pg. 331. (Page flipped for visibility).  ................... 74 

Figure 14. National Geographic, Jan. 1905, pg. 332–333. (Page flipped for visibility).  ........... 75 

Figure 15. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1905.  ............................................................................. 76 

xi 

Figure 16.  Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1905, Mother and Child – Italian, Ellis Island, 

silver gelatin print. ............................................................................................................ 77 

Figure 17. Raphael Sanzio, c. 1503, Madonna and Child ......................................................... 78 

Figure 18. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1902, Gypsy Family, Ellis Island, New York, New 

York, 9 1/8  x 6 s7/8 inches (24 x 17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, Augustus 
Sherman Photographs, ca. 1905–1914, William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and Archives 
Division, New York Public Library. ................................................................................... 79 

Figure 19. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1911, German Stowaway, Ellis Island, New York, 

New York, 9 1/8  x 6 s7/8 inches (24 x 17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, Augustus 
Sherman Photographs, ca. 1905–1914, William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and Archives 
Division, New York Public Library. ................................................................................... 80 

Figure 20. Unknown, Serno Dison, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society.......... 81 

Figure 21. Unknown, Eng Jeik, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society ............... 82 

Figure 22. Oakland Tribune published on Oct. 31, 1919. .......................................................... 83 

Figure 23. Unknown, Plaza Toros c. Juarez, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical 

Society .............................................................................................................................. 84 

Figure 24. Postcard, Plaza Toros, Bibliotheca de Ciudad Juarez ............................................. 84 

Figure 25. Unknown, Lau Sam, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society ............... 85 

Figure 26. Unknown, Sarga Sergoro, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society ...... 85 

Figure 27. William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public 

Library. ............................................................................................................................. 86 

Figure 28. Edwin Levick, American, c. 1913, Observing the harbor, 1913, silver gelatin print, 

William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. .. 87 

Figure 29. Sketch of immigrants, unknown, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs 

Division Washington, D.C. 20540 ..................................................................................... 87 

Figure 30. C. P. Scott (L), H.E. Gregory (R), c.1916, Aboriginal Australians, National 

Geographic. ...................................................................................................................... 88 

Figure 31. Unknown, c.1944, Detroit Immigration Station, United States Customs and Border 

Protection ......................................................................................................................... 88 

xii 

Figure 32. Unknown, c.1917, Mexican Immigrants in El Paso, University of California-

Berkeley. ........................................................................................................................... 89 

xiii 

CHAPTER ONE: 

CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL ATTITUDES TOWARD 

 IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES 

INTRODUCTION 

Though widely accepted as the visual record of early 20th century immigration, the Ellis 

Island work of photographer Lewis Wickes Hine omits1 representation of those classified 

“undesirable” upon arrival due to health, religion, culture or race. Used in history books, 

magazines, and museum exhibits—including at Ellis Island—when one encounters a historic 

image of immigrants at Ellis Island, there is a good chance it is a Hine photograph. To this end, 

his work creates a visual mythology in our collective memory that elicits nostalgia of Ellis Island 

as the celebrated entry point for millions of white Europeans. Contrary to this nostalgia, 

however, was the reality that attitudes of the time centered on protecting American cultural 

identity. These attitudes rejected the ethno-type of the ‘new immigrants’ flocking to the United 

States after a worldwide economic depression and the First World War. Through an examination 

of photographs of amateur photographer Augustus F. Sherman and the photographic collections 

of William Williams and John A. Robinson, this thesis, in the broadest sense, investigates the 

effect of ethnicity on representation in historical photography and how photographs were used to 

classify and surveil undesirable immigrants.  

Employed at immigration stations Sherman, Williams and Robinson were embedded at 

the front line of immigration during the decades preceding two of the most restrictive 

immigration reforms in U.S. history—the Asiatic Barred Zone Act (1917) and the Johnson-Reed 

Act (1924). This thesis will establish how the portraits of eastern and southern Europeans made 

by Sherman, an Ellis Island records clerk, were influenced by organizational culture imbued by 

1 

controversial immigration administrator William Williams. Like Robinson at Angel Island, 

Williams also collected photographs of immigrants, but for a slightly different purpose. In an act 

of quasi-propaganda, Williams distributed Sherman’s photographs to the press as examples of 

the wrong kinds of immigrant. The activities of Sherman and Williams will be contrasted against 

the images of Asian immigrants collected by Robinson, an Angel Island immigration inspector, 

as he investigated fraud and corruption in San Francisco. Though serving very different roles in 

the immigration process, Sherman, Williams and Robinson used photography to classify and 

surveil undesirable immigrants. This thesis explores how national biases and U.S. policy 

manifested in these photographic works, but it also helps to re-establish the presence of non-

Anglo-Saxons into the visual historic narrative of immigration into the United States. 

In the context of surveillance, photographers observe and document. Sherman saw the 

perceived menace of immigration first hand while working at Ellis Island. His contribution to 

combatting the threat immigration posed to society was through his photographs depicting only 

certain types of immigrants, while ignoring others. By identifying those perceived to be 

undesirable Sherman categorized immigrants by identifying specific races arriving at Ellis Island 

and providing visual evidence of their difference. Hine’s work at Ellis Island becomes important 

then in contrast, as it reveals a racial topology Sherman created through his work. Hine showed 

what immigrants experienced when they arrived in New York — the emotion, the process, the 

promise of a new life — with an immigrant’s origin irrelevant to the visual narrative he 

presented. Sherman however, honed in on physical qualities and characteristics that set 

immigrants apart from American standards of whiteness, making their origin central to his 

version of the visual narrative.   

2 

The act of collecting photographs also serves as a vital function to surveillance. Like 

Sherman choosing to photograph only this race and that race, Williams and Robinson chose 

which photographs to collect; and what one chooses to canonize is significant. The act of 

gathering, saving and preserving documents imbues the objects within a collection with 

importance. A collection creates, in essence, an ephemeral autobiography—a presentation of 

what one values and judges as most significant in their personal life or body of work. Preserved 

on two rolls of microfilm the collection of William Williams contains thousands of pages of 

documents related to the time he spent as one of the most influential figures in the U.S. Bureau 

of Immigration. Among the documents are personal correspondences, official records from Ellis 

Island, reports advocating for more restrictive federal immigration policy, and a collection of 

Sherman photographs that illustrate a narrow, negative view of the racial inferiority of 

immigrants at Ellis Island. Likewise, the collection of John Robinson, contains volumes of 

journals of handwritten notes detailing his investigations of crime and moral offenses, and 

among these pages photographs of Asian immigrants.  

Unlike Sherman’s photographs which suggested there was racial variety among 

undesirable European immigrants, the Robinson photographs present a more homogeneous view 

of Asian immigrants—that all Chinese immigrants are undesirable. Both of these collections of 

photographs reinforce the broader message of the collections they are nested in that the 

immigration of certain Europeans and the Chinese were detrimental to economic interests as well 

as the cultural and racial heritage of U.S. society. Anthropological on the surface it would seem 

as though the actions of Robinson, Williams and Sherman are showing us glimpses of the 

immigrant’s nature as a novelty, their exotic appeal through physical characteristics, their dress 

and implied cultural origin. However, the true anthropological effect of both these collections of 

3 

photographic work is actually in revealing the nature of the culture in which the immigrant was 

arriving; an American culture of economic castes, white supremacy and cultural and religious 

exclusivity.   

Most examinations of history require a system of classification, a hierarchy to be 

established in order to conceptualize the roles of those involved. Classification allows for the 

objects or individuals under examination to be placed within a structure so that roles can be 

given significance and meaning assigned by connecting their relationship to others. The 

examined occupy three distinct categories as an agent, actor or subject of history. Agents are 

defined by their place in society and within the structure of history itself. Their significance lies 

with where they fall along a social spectrum.2 Examining one of the themes central to the present 

investigation, the dynamics of power, for example, the social spectrum includes government 

administrators and lower bureaucrats, as well as immigrants. Where these individuals or groups 

fall within the structure of power—from commanding the locus of control at one end of the 

hierarchy, to being void of agency at the other—determines their significance as agents of 

history. Actors, on the other hand, are significant depending upon the specific context in which 

they exist.3 The role of actors is not fixed like agents; they are variable, dependent on both place 

and time. A communist living in the U.S. today, for example, does not have the same 

significance as they would have during the era of McCarthyism, or one living in China. The 

context of the two eras and the locations are different thus changing the significance of a 

communist as an actor. The final category, subjects of history, is perhaps the most central to an 

investigation. Subjects are the very elements that define and construct instances of history.4 

Using the well-researched topic of labor strikes, for example, illustrates the role of a subject and 

how that particular role interacts with both agents and actors of history. While workers, 

4 

individually may occupy the category of agents as being part of an economic hierarchy, 

collectively their actions are the subject of history because without them, without the labor 

movement, there would not be labor strikes. It is the subject’s existence then, that is responsible 

for defining the particular history being investigated.  

Following this classification structure this thesis will examine the relationship between 

the agents, actors and subjects at work in producing and collecting photographic artifacts meant 

to surveil immigrants. The relationship between photography and immigration policy has been 

well established through the works of scholars such as Anna Pegler-Gordon, Peter Sexias and 

Erica Rand. The present investigation, however, re-examines this relationship within the context 

of race and the structure of state power. The argument presented over the following chapters is 

that in addition to being a vehicle for exclusion, photography was also used as a method of 

surveillance to identify, record, and in certain circumstances, publicize the physical 

characteristics of immigrants classified as racially or culturally undesirable in the early 20th 

century. In working toward developing this argument, the remainder of chapter one will provide 

a primer on U.S. immigration attitudes, beginning with the historical contexts of contemporary 

views. Chapter one will also serve as introduction to the archives, archival materials, agents, 

actors and subjects central to this investigation. Chapter two describes in detail the 

methodological approaches and procedures that will be used for analysis throughout this thesis. 

This chapter describes the manner in which photographs will be read, described and interpreted 

and how meaning will be assigned. Building off the introduction to attitudes expressed in chapter 

one, chapter three examines in greater detail the forces and factors that contributed to the rise of 

nativism and anti-immigrant sentiments in the early 20th century. These factors, including 

culture, geography, economics, policy and the media will be explored as actors in the historical 

5 

framework in order to understand the conditions in which photographs were produced, but more 

importantly collected. Finally, chapter four will bring all of these historical contexts, conditions, 

forces and factors into focus which will provide the collective evidence of this thesis’ claim that 

these photographs were collected to surveil undesirable immigrants. 

ESTABLISHING THE CONTEXT FOR THIS THESIS 

During the first two decades of the 20th century, amateur photographer Augustus F. 

Sherman photographed immigrants as they arrived at Ellis Island. Between 1905 and 1920, 

Lithuanians, Slavs, Romas, Guadeloupians, Italians, Catholics, Jews, among other immigrant 

groups numbering in the hundreds, sat or stood before Sherman’s camera as they were indelibly 

recorded on fragile glass negatives.5 In total, 250 images of immigrants from various countries of 

origin are known to be have been made by Sherman while he worked as a clerk at the storied 

immigration station. By modern standards, this does not appear to be all that extraordinary. 

Today millions of amateur photographers worldwide make billions of photographs throughout 

the course of daily life with an instant swipe and tap of a finger on the interface of their mobile 

devices. To this effect more images are made every second today than were made during the 

entire 19th century.6 This was not the case, however, in the early part of the 20th century when 

Sherman made these images. Despite significant advances in photographic processes and 

technologies, in 1905 Sherman made his first images with traditional glass negatives, which 

made photography an arduous endeavor. Almost two decades had passed since Kodak developed 

roll film cameras, introducing the photographic medium more broadly to the public, and the 

halftone process was introduced, which made it possible to reproduce photographic images on a 

6 

printing press. Photography as Sherman practiced it continued to be laborious—a deliberate 

undertaking requiring time and planning to execute. 

Within this context and bearing in mind that Sherman made these images in tandem with 

the routines of his professional function as a clerk, his body of work could be considered prolific 

for the era in which it was produced. Yet despite the effort he would have gone to in order to 

identify his subjects, set up his equipment and make, in many cases, multiple compositions of the 

same groups or individuals, there is little if any documented evidence as to why he made these 

photographs.7 From a historical perspective, the images are significant because pictorially they 

deviate from what is now considered and accepted as the iconic Ellis Island imagery made by 

celebrated photographers such as Hine. In an almost anthropological approach, Sherman 

documented immigrants at Ellis Island that appeared exotic, unusual or had physical 

abnormalities creating a pseudo-dichotomy of ethnic types – a visual topology of immigrants. 

Though his work was gradually forgotten after his death, while he was working at Ellis Island 

and making pictures his photographs were very much in the public eye appearing in The New 

York Times, National Geographic magazine and other publications of the era. He sought out 

those that looked unusual to sit for him, weaving a racial tapestry into the body of his work. This 

same type of variety is not found in the more homogeneous western European-centric aesthetic 

of Hine’s work. The diversion between Sherman and the work of other photographers of the era 

will be explored in more depth in later sections. However, it is important to mention early in this 

examination as it helps set the stage for exploration of attitudes toward immigration in the United 

States and the role photography played in shaping those attitudes.   

After Sherman’s death in 1925, the photographs slipped into obscurity while in the 

possession of the Sherman family until they were donated to the American Immigration Museum 

7 

in the 1960s and 1980s.8 However, a relatively significant number, 41 prints, were held in the 

private collection of former Ellis Island Immigration Commissioner William Williams. The two 

terms Williams served as commissioner were mired by controversy as he received harsh 

criticism for his highly unfavorable views and policies toward certain types of immigrants. 

Facing mounting pressure and condemnation for the treatment of eastern and southern European 

immigrants at Ellis Island, Williams was forced to resign during his first term in 1905.9 After his 

successor, Robert Watchorn, allowed processes and protocols at Ellis Island to completely 

deteriorate, Williams was reappointed to his former post by President Theodore Roosevelt in 

1909.10 While Sherman and his photographs have re-emerged and are beginning to be studied 

more by contemporary historians, the sub-collection possessed by Williams has received less 

attention. One of the purposes of this thesis is to investigate the context in which a set of 

Sherman’s portraits came to be collected by Williams, focusing on 22 images in the collection 

that were published in newspapers, magazines and books between 1905 and 1920. Examination 

of other historical documents contained in the Williams collection such as annual reports, 

correspondence, newspaper clippings and scrapbooks provide context to the production and 

collection of the Sherman photographs. By comparison, how Sherman’s photographs were used 

in the press to surveil undesirables as they entered the country differs slightly from how the 

collection of photographs from another immigration official were used for surveillance.  

Like Williams, John A. Robinson. was an agent of the state, a cog in the massive 

bureaucratic mechanism of the U.S. Immigration Service. Robinson was an immigration 

inspector who investigated crime, corruption and various forms of malfeasance at the San 

Francisco immigration station at Angel Island. The California Historical Society houses a 

collection of correspondence, photographic prints and journal volumes belonging to Robinson. 

8 

The journals contain details of daily activities recorded while investigating, primarily Asian, 

immigrants. The photographs, mostly tightly framed headshots, are also primarily of Asian 

immigrants. This offers a visual contrast for comparison to the Sherman portraits of primarily 

European immigrants arriving in New York. The comparison between the two collections of 

photographs is significant because, while they both depict immigrant populations seen as 

undesirable at the time, they reflect very different realities in terms of the policies in place 

regarding Asian versus European undesirables at the time. In 1882, Chinese immigration to the 

U.S. was halted with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Discussed in more detail in 

chapter three, the Literacy Act of 1917—also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act—built upon 

that policy to exclude immigrants from the entire Asian continent, with the exception of newly 

acquired U.S. protectorates such as the Philippines. Beyond the contrast of immigrant ethnicity 

and official immigration policy at the time, the Robinson collection will be examined due to the 

inherent natural symmetry between the two collections. Both collections were created by 

immigration officials and include photographs of immigrants that were used in official capacity 

by the collector to support their roles in the immigration process.  

ATTITUDES TOWARD IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES 

Between 2013 and 2014 the manuscripts and archives division of the New York Public 

Library (NYPL) digitized 41 Sherman portraits contained in the Williams collection. In 2015, 

after the Sherman photographs were added to the NYPL online digital collection, CBS News 

produced a segment heralding the “re-discovery” of the images and published a link to the story 

to the media outlet’s Facebook page. The post titled “The rich history of Ellis Island in portraits 

of immigrants circa 1900” featured two images along with a description of the types of images 

9 

contained in the collection. One of the featured portraits made in 1911, titled “Guadeloupian 

woman,” (Figure 4) depicts a woman wearing ‘le costume de l’affranchie’ consisting of a 

patterned dress and head wrap traditional to the small Caribbean island that customarily signified 

the status of being a freed female slave. The pose of the subject is reminiscent of Physionotrace 

engravings (Figure 5) popular in late 18th and early 19th century for their claims of “mechanically 

transcribed truth.”11 Invented in 1786 by Giles Louis Chrétien, the Physionotrace commoditized 

the production of silhouette and profile likenesses by mechanizing the engraving process, which 

significantly lowered the cost of production, sparking a craze amongst the middle- and lower-

classes for portraiture, a luxury previously unattainable to the masses. Photographing the 

Guadeloupian woman in profile places her in that social class as well as accentuates the 

physiological characteristics of her facial features. Her raised cheekbones, the shallow outward 

curvature of her nose leading to her forward jaw are all emphasized as being counter to the 

Teutonic facial types of the Germanic, Nordic and Anglo immigrants considered highly desirable 

at the time.     

Reactions to the CBS News segment varied across the spectrum of discourse. User 

comments on the Facebook post ranged from “I have the original papers from when my great 

grandparents came from Hungary. Grandfather played for the New York philharmonic 

symphony in 1890s,” to “I heard immigrants from Mexico were crossing the borders illegally, 

with no recorded documentation, and moving to sanctuary cities. They can vote, get free 

healthcare, housing, food at the working taxpayer’s expense. Hmm, maybe just a rumor.” Neither 

of these comments have any direct or significant relevance to the CBS News segment, or the 

photographic collection itself, but they are indicative of the phenomena of polarization that is 

central to the issue of immigration. That a set of photographs can evoke such opposite reactions 

10 

more than a century after they were made is a testament to just how polarizing the issue of 

immigration is in the U.S. and underscores the power photography has to reinforce beliefs. 

Often described as an immigrant nation, the attitudes and policies in the United States 

toward immigration is a story of contradiction, austerity, nativism and exclusion.12,13 A mainstay 

in the national discourse since early colonialism, immigration remains an emotional and 

polarizing issue.14,15 From nativist views purporting that immigration dilutes the national identity

to arguments of economic burdens, immigration is a complex phenomenon often with regional or 

local nuances.16  Since the Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) instituted 

nationality quotas and barred immigrants from Asia all together, the United States has continued 

to place ever higher restrictions on immigration. In the 61 years since Ellis Island closed as a 

processing facility, U.S. immigration policy has continued to be a divisive and complicated 

issue. Violence and economic crisis in Central America and wars, genocide and oppression in the 

Middle East have replaced the European social, civil and an economic crisis of the early 20th 

century as the impetus for migration to the United States. Yet despite the outward projection of 

the United States being a bastion of freedom and land of opportunity for all, Lazarus’ notion of 

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”—which is 

etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty—is not easily reconciled with the continuing 

national attitudes and policies toward immigration.  

In his first week in office, President Donald Trump issued three executive orders on 

immigration. The first order, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” 

focused on bolstering the enforcement of current U.S. immigration laws as well as targeting 

‘sanctuary cities’ with the threat of eliminating federal funding to the extent permissible by law. 

While the concept of sanctuary areas in the United States dates back to slavery when fugitive 

11 

slaves found refuge and protection while fleeing to free states,17 the term “sanctuary city” has a 

more recent origin. During the 1980s, federal policy denied asylum status to refugees from El 

Salvador and Guatemala despite those countries being ravaged by civil war.18 Amidst public 

outcry over the policies, several U.S. cities began adopting local ordinances to permit and 

encourage admittance to Central American refugees. Sanctuary cities establish safe zones in 

which city officials, such as local law enforcement, are prohibited “from cooperating with the 

arrest or deportation of any Central Americans within city limits.”19 San Francisco was one of 

the first major U.S. cities to adopt such an ordinance citing that immigration was a jurisdiction of 

the federal government and as such “federal employees, not city employees, should be 

considered responsible for implementation of immigration and refugee policy.”20 Since the 

1980s, the number of sanctuary cities has increased to the present level, which includes 167 

cities and counties in 13 states.21  

The second presidential executive order on immigration, “Border Security and 

Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” authorized the construction of a physical wall to 

separate the U.S.-Mexico border. While amplified during the 2016 presidential election, rhetoric 

surrounding the building of a wall along the southern border of the United States is not a new 

idea. Constructing physical boundaries segregates populations along man-made lines of 

demarcation. Walls, such as the one separating the West Bank from Israel, the one that divided 

Berlin during the Cold War, and the ones built by dynastic China beginning in the 7th century to 

protect themselves from nomadic advances from the Eurasian Steppe, are symbolic of exclusion 

and alienation. The notion of such a wall in the United States is often meant to reinforce 

historical perceptions of immigrants as intruders, criminals and a threat to a national identity 

beholden to Anglo-Saxon traditions.22 The concept of building a physical barrier as a solution to 

12 

immigration issues in the south and west was also a prevalent theme in the 2012 U.S. presidential 

election. One 2011 article from The New York Times describes a rally for then-Republican 

candidate Herman Cain that exemplifies the ardent and often zealous rhetoric regarding 

immigration that can manifest in the body politic.  

Mr. Cain, speaking at a Tea Party-sponsored rally in Tennessee, made some of his most 
pointed remarks yet on the issue. He said he might use military troops “with real guns 
and real bullets” to stop intruders.23  

The executive order also prescribed the establishment of immigration detention centers 

along the border with Mexico. Much like the idea of a wall, detention centers are not a new 

concept, having already been a reality in the narrative of U.S. immigration policy. From the time 

of its construction at China Cove in 1905, the immigration station at Angel Island operated as a 

detention center built specifically as a holding place for immigrants barred from entering the 

United States after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Even the palace-like monolithic 

compound at Ellis Island was relegated to use almost exclusively for detention and deportation in 

the waning years of operation as a U.S. immigration station.24  

The third presidential executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist 

Entry into The United States,” mandated a temporary ban on travel to the United States by 

individuals hailing from seven primarily Muslim countries. Rhetoric during the campaign of 

wanting a U.S. ban on Muslims prompted the executive order to be seen by many as fulfillment 

of that desire and was quickly challenged in court. The Trump administration defended the travel 

ban, citing “broad executive powers on immigration” and that there was precedence in that 

similar bans had been ordered by past administrations. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 

the Barred Asiatic Zone Act of 1917, to the denial of entry to thousands of Jewish refugees 

fleeing war-torn Europe during World War II25, the United States has had a sordid past when it 

13 

comes to the admittance of various ethnicities, especially in times of international conflict. Yet, 

as controversial as these executive orders were, inciting outcry and mass protest, they were not 

unexpected as they fulfill promises made during one of the most polarizing presidential 

campaigns in U.S. history. All of these orders were immediately challenged in court, and none 

have been implemented to their fullest extent as of completion of the present investigation.  

Public attitude toward immigration has a long and complicated history.26,27 From citizens 

to advocacy groups and politicians, the issue of immigration is often an emotional one receiving 

national attention. Elections can often amplify the discourse adding rigid polarization between 

those on both sides of the debate. But beliefs that immigrants are criminals, however, do not just 

emerge during elections. Those beliefs are a constant undertone in the national discourse.28 

When a wildfire broke out near the Bear Wallow Wilderness area in eastern Arizona, many held 

the belief the fire was caused by those trying to enter the country illegally. 

“Who set the fire?” asked Ed Ashurst, an area rancher who is convinced that he knows. 
“It’s obvious. There’s a few people in America who don’t think man walked on the moon 
in 1969. To say that illegal aliens didn’t set the fire is like saying that Neil Armstrong 
didn’t walk on the moon.” Mr. Ashurst acknowledges that his case is circumstantial. “Did 
anyone see the aliens drop a match or a cigarette? No. But we all know who started this. 
Who else would be up there?”29  

Forming beliefs is a complicated psycho-physiological process combining environmental 

factors, individual experience and exposure to external information that is internalized and 

reconciled with what we know, or believe we know, to be true.30 While contemporary beliefs 

about immigration are not the focus of this investigation, it is important to highlight where the 

United States currently is as a nation, in order to begin to understand where it has been. 

Celebrated American author and satirist Mark Twain is often purported to have said, “history 

never repeats itself, but it rhymes.”31,32 That adage has also been attributed to James Eayrs,33,34 

but more important than its provenance is the notion that histories are not linear, but cyclical. 

14 

The history of immigration in the United States is no different. The attitudes and beliefs 

Americans harbor toward immigration have not changed much over time. What has changed are 

the ethnicities to whom those attitudes and beliefs are assigned, and the criteria used in 

establishing who are desirable and welcome and who are not worthy of sharing in the ideals, 

principles and promises of the American Dream.35 During the time period this investigation 

focuses on—1900–1925—eastern and southern Europeans as well as Asians were classified as 

undesirable.36,37  

PHOTOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION 

Any discussion of photography and immigration in the early 20th century would be 

incomplete without acknowledging the body of work of Lewis Wickes Hine. Described as one of 

the preeminent documentary photographers of the time, Hine’s work at Ellis Island reinforced his 

egalitarian views of America and solidified his place as an ardent advocate for the voiceless, 

disadvantaged and exploited38,39 Hine didn’t begin exploring photography until after he moved 

from Oshkosh, Wisconsin to New York in 1901. While teaching botany and natural science at 

the Ethical Cultural School, headmaster Frank Manny put a camera in his hand and suggested he 

use the emerging medium as a teaching method in his classroom.40 Four years later, he headed to 

Ellis Island and it would be another three years before he decided to dedicate his life to 

photography.  

In 1908, Hine left teaching to take a contract as an investigator and photographer with the 

National Child Labor Committee, a non-profit organization founded in 1904 by New York 

clergyman Edgar Gardner Murphy with the mission to promote “the rights, awareness, dignity, 

well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working.”41 Hine’s 

15 

work for the NCLC lead to the production of what is considered to be some of his most 

important work in illuminating the human condition to society at large.42 Still after leaving his 

post as a formal teacher, Hine considered himself an educator first and foremost. Instead of grade 

school children and adolescents, to Hine his pupils became society and greater humanity was the 

curriculum. Given Hine’s progressive mindset, photographic historian Judith Gutman suggests 

that he was at constant odds with the reformist views of nativists prevalent in the era he 

photographed. Gutman writes that Hine “stayed too completely in his private world of 

conceptions, his private world of feelings, even his private approach to public things like reform 

and used the young and growing field of photography to stand boldly against the towering 

background which was emerging.”43 That towering background was the rapidly emerging urban 

landscape spawned by industrialization and rife with classism, corruption, poverty and crime.44  

In his own words Hine believed photography was not meant to record but to “interpret”45 

the world. Historian Peter Seixas suggests Hine’s motivation was quasi-altruistic; he aimed to 

show the “humanity and dignity of workers and the working class.”46 This motif was certainly 

evident in later projects but bore its foundation in his work at Ellis Island. For instance, his 

image “Italian Family En Route to Ellis Island,” (Figure 6) is emblematic of his philosophical 

aesthetic. The image depicts a family aboard a ferry from the Manhattan Battery on their way to 

Ellis Island for processing. Unlike many immigrants who wore brightly colored costumes 

indicative of their native cultures upon arrival, this family’s dress is subdued. They present 

themselves to be working-class and their appearance demonstrates a shared western idealism as 

if to communicate their ability to successfully assimilate into American society.47 With a stoic 

expression, the man carries a large and cumbersome pack upon his shoulders in an almost 

16 

evidentiary display of his physical prowess, signifying his potential for arduous work in the 

nation’s industrial sector.  

It is his work at Ellis Island in 1905 that has indelibility permeated a visual mythology of 

what the immigration of Europeans to the United States looked like. Celebrated documentarian 

Ken Burns often speaks of this idea of “mental glue,”48 that catches, categorizes and congeals 

our collective memory. For the immigration of Europeans to the United States in the early 20th 

century, that mental glue is Hine’s images. While Sherman’s work faded from the public’s 

collective memory, Hine’s images from Ellis Island endured to become the accepted visual 

narrative of early 20th century immigration. His work provides the backdrop and the visual 

context that, when combined with family lore, leads to the nostalgia for Ellis Island shared by so 

many of what their ancestors endured in seeking a new life in the new world.  

Gutman suggests that because of his egalitarian principles, and his desire for “revelation” 

through his notion of being “fellow citizens of one great people,” Hine was often conscientiously 

in conflict with the era in which he lived and worked.49 His belief that the average worker, the 

immigrant was just as “you and I”50 was contrary to the reformist nativist views prevalent in turn 

of the century American society.51 It is perhaps because of this disjuncture combined with his 

interpretive approach to photography that much of his work at Ellis Island possesses 

homogeneity in ethnic representation. Hine’s pursuit of constructing a reality of equality when it 

came to immigrants at Ellis Island had the effect of omitting representation of populations 

deemed undesirable in the contemporary society. Hine’s later work, however, specifically of 

steelworkers for the Pittsburgh Survey, was more inclusive of various immigrant types, Slavs in 

particular. The Pittsburgh Survey was a project spearheaded by Russell Sage, who owned the 

Western Union Telegraph Company. The project focused on identifying the social and economic 

17 

problems of the Pittsburgh region in an attempt to improve the civic and industrial needs of the 

people.52 Hine’s work with the Pittsburgh Survey helps contribute to an understanding of the 

influence stereotypes and economic conditions had on nativist perceptions of immigration.  

That Hine approached photography from a personal philosophy and social motivation 

puts into context the notion that photographs are not free of bias.53,54 Making an image, as with 

creating any type of message, is the deliberate making of a series of decisions. Advancements in 

technology, for instance interchangeable lenses, continue to increase the number of choices a 

photographer has, but even historically, photographers could choose what angle to shoot from, 

what to include in the frame or what to exclude, and who or what would be their subjects. All of 

these decisions along with the instinctual judgment of when the decisive moment arrives, and the 

shutter is released have profound impact on the resulting image and representation of reality.55 

But as sociologist and Protestant theologian Peter Berger points out, reality is a social 

construction of man. As such, histories are especially challenging, because they are constructed 

from the particular viewpoint of those providing the narrative at an alternate point in time and 

cannot be verified through direct observation.56 To this end, it is important to consider the very 

nature of photography, especially within the historical context that photographs are produced.   

French theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, who is credited with developing the 

field of semiotics, argues that photography as a medium has no inherent code.57 Celebrated art 

historian John Tagg echoes this notion, writing that, “photography has no meaning outside its 

historical specifications … its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which 

define it and set it to work.”58 Considering Sherman as an agent of history, it is not known 

whether the immigration commissioners he served with at Ellis Island directly requested he 

undertake these photographic endeavors. However, given the volume of his known work, and the 

18 

amount of time that would have been required to produce such a body of work, it could be 

argued that at minimum there was at least a tacit support of his photographic salvos especially 

considering both Williams and his successor Frederic C. Howe collected Sherman’s 

photographs. To illuminate the environment of photographing at Ellis Island Hine writes, “We 

are elbowing our way thro {sic} the mob at Ellis trying to stop the surge of bewildered beings 

oozing through the corridors, up the stairs and all over the place, eager to get it all over and be on 

their way.”59 This description of the brink of chaos is in stark contrast to the calm settings and 

formal poses of Sherman’s subjects, who were often photographed in isolation giving the illusion 

they were the only ones there. But Sherman as a producer of photography is not the only agent 

that serves as an important factor in considering the meaning of photography under Tagg’s 

assertion. As collectors Williams and Robinson were acting as representatives of the ‘institution’ 

of immigration. 

Photography by its very nature plays an important role in shaping public opinion and U.S. 

policies of exclusion. From the Great Depression and Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” to 

the Vietnam War era’s “Napalm Girl,” and “Street Execution of a Vietcong Prisoner” 

photography has influenced public opinion of controversial issues. Images made through the lens 

of skilled photographers can go beyond showing the world what something looked like and 

illuminate what happened.60 Photographs have the power to visually depict cultural and ethnic 

differences among immigrant populations, for instance, reinforcing notions that they don’t look 

like they belong. The idiom “seeing is believing,”61 is imperative to the paradigm of photography 

as it suggests that one must actually observe a phenomenon to truly accept that it exists. In the 

case of immigrants, it is one thing to tell society that certain types of ethnicities do not fit within 

the cultural and racial constructs of being an American. Showing their cultural and ethnic 

19 

differences through a photograph, however, has a completely different impact in reinforcing 

those beliefs because it creates a voyeuristic scenario allowing society to see these differences 

for themselves.   

While not the genesis of negative attitudes toward immigrants, photography has 

historically played an important role in shaping both public opinion and U.S. policy toward 

immigration issues. Existing research into this effect focuses on the use of photography as an 

instrument of exclusion of Chinese immigrants toward the end of the 19th century and the 

beginning of the 20th century.62 Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and leading up to 

the Barred Asiatic Zone Act of 1917, the United States placed more and more stringent 

restrictions on immigrants from Asia including implementation of requirements for photographic 

identification. Pegler-Gordon and Lee argue the photographic ID requirement, while expanded to 

all immigrants in the 1920s, was initially implemented to underscore the status of Chinese and 

other Asian immigrants as genetically, culturally and economically undesirable.63,64 After 

passage on May 5, 1917 of the Barred Asiatic Zone Act closed immigration to the Asian 

continent, the exception being Philippine nationals, the undesirable status was extended to 

include immigrants from eastern and some southern European countries as well, because of their 

proximity to Asia. Studies investigating the portrayal of ethnic Roma, or Romani people, often 

derogatorily referred to as “Gypsies,”65 or the Greek diaspora surrounding the Mediterranean,66 

suggest minority representation in photography is often a form of exclusion. Photography 

visually illustrates the cultural and physical differences among ethnic populations and racializes 

those differences.67 Images of immigrants, in particular Eastern Europeans and Asians, serve as 

reinforcement of these groups status as “undesirable” based on the notion that “they don’t look 

like Americans.”68  

20 

CHAPTER TWO: 

METHODS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS 

“Though his pictures have the look of anthropological studies, in that most of the people face the 

camera directly, and all of them are isolated from their surroundings against a plain white 

background, most of his subjects are drawn from a narrow range of Western types. ... He seems 
to be possessed by an artistic vision of the American West as purgatory, if not hell, on earth.” 

— Gene Thornton, 1985 

This passage from The New York Times art critic Gene Thornton’s review of famed 

fashion photographer Richard Avedon’s book and exhibition “In the American West, 1979–

1984” is a classic example of analysis and criticism of the photographic art form.1 Besides the 

utility of illustrating the result of photographic analysis, Thornton’s assessment of the effect 

Avedon’s visual aesthetic had on limiting his ability to authentically capture the spirit of his 

subject matter closely resembles Sherman’s inadequacy in portraying the true nature of 

immigrants at Ellis Island. There are striking similarities between analysis of Avedon’s western 

portraits when they debuted and how Sherman’s photographs can be described today. Thornton 

compared Avedon’s commissioned portraiture of the west to that of German photographer 

August Sander’s survey of Germans between the World Wars that set out to illustrate “what is 

most characteristic” of the subjects.2 Sherman’s constructed visual topology compared to Hine’s 

survey of immigrants at Ellis Island reveal a failure similar to Avedon’s portrayal of the west. 

While Hine and Sander were both methodical in their subject selection, Sherman and Avedon, by 

comparison, were more reliant on their idiosyncratic visions of who their subjects should be.3 In 

drawing critical comparisons between the work of Avedon and Sander, critics like Thornton lay 

the groundwork for subsequent comparisons such as the present comparison of the work of 

Sherman and Hine. The advantage here though is that whereas the work of Avedon and Sander 

21 

were separated by more than five decades, Sherman and Hine’s work were in direct conversation 

with one another, each debating opposing conventions of immigration within the same historic 

public sphere. Building upon these described comparisons makes it possible to construct 

understanding of how photographs are assembled in collections, such as the collection of 

Williams and Robinson, and what meaning can be assigned to those collections. 

ASSIGNING MEANING TO HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS 

How can it be known, that the family in Hine’s photograph (Figure 6), are Italian? Or that 

the way the man in the photograph is holding his bags has significance? Likewise, how can 

meaning be derived from the way Sherman posed the Guadeloupian woman (Figure 4)? 

Examining evidence found outside the photographs themselves. Sources of such evidence can be 

found in many different places. Primarily sources such as letters, notes, scrapbooks, journals, or 

direct ethnographic observation, and secondary sources such as history texts or documentaries all 

provide valuable evidence in supporting the construction of historical conclusions. Hine was 

methodical in his research and documentation, so from the description he provides in his caption, 

“Italian Family En Route to Ellis Island,” it is reasonable to conclude the family is Italian. This 

caption, an example of a primary source in that it came directly from the photographer who made 

the image, provides important context to the photograph. Though comprised of only seven 

words, there is a great deal of information that can be gleaned from the caption that makes it 

possible to describe and interpret the photograph. For instance, that the family is “en route” to 

Ellis Island places them on the deck of a ferryboat, rather than on an ocean liner, meaning they 

are on the last leg of their long and arduous travel across the Atlantic. Very little of the boat can 

be seen in the photograph except the waffled-pattern railing in the foreground and a row of 

22 

windows in the background, yet that conclusion can be made by researching and understanding 

how immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. Because the majority of the island was man-made, the 

harbor was too shallow to accommodate the deep draft of an ocean liner4. This forced the 

massive steamships to dock at Castle Garden, the former immigration-processing center located 

at the southern tip of Manhattan known as The Battery. Immigrants would disembark, and then 

be loaded onto smaller ferryboats that would take them to Ellis Island for processing. Knowing 

how immigrants arrived at Ellis Island also allows for additional conclusions about the 

photograph to be made. For instance, knowing that ferryboats docked at Ellis Island with their 

bows pointing west along a pier that ran parallel to the southern façade of the great hall suggests 

that the Italian family is standing on the starboard side of the boat. Evidence for this conclusion 

found outside the photograph can be reinforced by evidence within the photograph as well.  

Examine the man to the right of the family as an example. The man is looking past the 

frame of the photograph and holding his bags at the ready as if he is anticipating something 

about to happen. The directionality of his stance, and that he has gathered his belongings, 

suggests then that the boat is arriving at Ellis Island and he is looking toward the bow of the boat 

where passengers disembark. This reinforces the initial conclusion, made by assessing the 

historical procedures of ferryboat arrival at the island that the passengers are on the starboard 

deck. Whether or not it is important to come to this specific conclusion depends on the questions 

being asked and the focus of the particular research being conducted. Although this conclusion is 

not particularly relevant to the current investigation, it has illustrated how critical historical 

evidence is within the process of describing and interpreting photographs; and it sets the stage 

for outlining the process of analysis that will be used in this thesis. It also illustrates that much 

more can be known about the reality of a particular scene than what appears to be happening 

23 

within a photograph. Without presenting evidence external to the photograph, though, it could 

not have been read with the context needed to completely understand the photograph as history, 

rather than just an artifact of a historical event.  

DESCRIBING AND INTERPRETING PHOTOGRAPHS 

Philosopher Roland Barthes, in his explanation of how to approach the analysis of 

photographs, lays out a process of both denotative and connotative description.5 The denotative 

aspect of analysis prescribes for the literal reading of a photograph. Considerations in this regard 

include aspects of the photograph such as its physical size, its tonal value and how elements are 

arranged in the frame. These are the pictorial conventions that “fall below the threshold of 

conscious attention” and are often the focus of social science approaches to visual cultural 

analysis. For example, description of how Sherman’s Guadeloupian woman (Figure 4) was posed 

and her facial characteristics were examples of the denotative approach. However, the 

implication that those facial characteristics deviated from the characteristics of those who were 

considered desirable immigrant types, moved the analysis to the connotative approach. 

Connotative description begins to see the manifestation of early interpretation moving beyond 

the literal reading of an image to reading it for secondary meaning. Secondary meanings are 

those that can be implied; for example, that a low camera angle connotes power because from 

that perspective the subject is imbued with stature and is looking down upon other elements in 

the photograph, or even the reader.  

To further illustrate this, consider two photographs of the Empire State Building. The 

first photograph (Figure 7) is shot from a considerable southern facing elevation and shows mid-

town Manhattan in the foreground, the Empire State Building being the focus, with lower 

24 

Manhattan and the recently completed One World Trade Center in the distant background. 

Denotatively this photograph shows, for those familiar with the geography of Manhattan, where 

the building is located, and in terms of scale, that it towers in height over the buildings that 

surround it. Compare this to the second photograph (Figure 8), where denotatively, aside from 

noting the angle of view and the upward leading lines, there is not a tremendous amount to 

describe. Connotatively however, the secondary meaning of stature and power, and in this case 

architectural achievement, begins to manifest as the reader stands ostensibly in awe of this 

magnificent edifice that towers to such heights that its very apex is not visible. Though this 

example is of an inanimate structure, it is emblematic of the task ahead in describing a group of 

immigrant portraits that on the surface, denotatively are relatively benevolent, however 

connotatively, possesses a more ominous meaning.  

Chapter one began to illustrate that immigration is a complicated issue. It follows then 

that analysis of photographs that depict immigration would be complicated as well, given the 

nuanced nature of race and culture embodied in the images. Navigating the vast complexity of 

immigration, it is helpful to focus on the immigrant both as an individual, the subject of a 

photograph, but also as a symbol in determining what that photograph means. To accomplish 

this, analysis needs to consider immigrants in terms of migration, a function of instinct to 

relocate in order to fulfill the need to survive, but at the same time consider the symbolic nature 

of this act. Within the social construction of reality, Berger and Luckmann posit a notion of the 

duality of man6. In one respect there is man as a biological entity, the literal description of what 

he is, the denotative man. He is a living, breathing being, comprised of much of the same 

materials as any other living organism7. Then there is a man, a social-psychological entity. This 

second description of man, the connotative man, is represented by the personality and individual 

25 

traits that constitute the concept of self 8. This description examines man for who he is rather than 

what he is. This same perspective will be considered in the approach to the discussion of the 

immigrants photographed within the collections under examination. The immigrant will be 

considered both for their denotation as an individual or group of individuals migrating from one 

place to another, and for the connotation of what that migration meant to Americans in a 

historical context. This approach to analysis moves beyond seeing just an individual from far off 

lands wearing elaborate costumes and places the immigrant within the context of the society 

where they are arriving.   

The process of denotative and connotative description is also important for the approach 

of analysis in this thesis because the collections being examined are vastly different. It is not 

known who made the photographs that Robinson collected. While it is known that Sherman 

made the photographs that Williams collected, it is not known why Sherman made the 

photographs to begin with. To reconcile the challenges of unknown causal circumstances, a 

comparative approach to interpretation will need to be taken. In order to fully describe the 

photographs and assign meaning based on the context of their creation, they will need to be 

compared to other photographic works and contrasted against other historical evidence available 

in the collections. Comparison is necessary because in the case of both sets of images, Sherman 

and the unknown photographer(s) from the Robinson collection have no other known bodies of 

work to reference. It becomes necessary then to compare these collections to the works of other 

contemporary photographers, which is why Hine is central to understanding the photographs 

under examination. Using the approaches of denotative and connotative description and 

comparative analysis, the present investigation will explore socio-economic indicators of cultural 

influences on nationalist attitudes and historical immigration policies to understand and draw 

26 

conclusions about the photographic collections under examination. 

27 

CHAPTER 3: 

RACE, NATAVISM AND POLICY:  

TOWARD THE EXCLUSION OF UNDESIREABLE IMMIGRANTS 

“…more than 14,000,000 still live among us, and their children and children’s children are now 

in good truth bone of our bone and blood of our blood.”1 

This excerpt from a 1917 National Geographic article “Our Foreign Born Citizens” 

exemplifies a pervasive social concern present in the early 20th century that immigration would 

inevitably lead to the “mixing of races.” Illustrated by 27 of Sherman’s photographs, the article 

introduces the complex notion of race into the present discussion of immigration. Race is an 

important underlying current that flows throughout the forces of capitalism, culture, society and 

government. Discussing this powerful current is essential in framing understanding of this period 

and how these forces coalesced to construct the conditions of exclusion present at both Ellis 

Island and Angel Island. Race is a societal construct, a man-made mechanism of power in which 

to systematically sort, categorize and label individuals and groups along a dynamic scale of 

whiteness. The scale is dynamic, race lacks fixity in both the temporal and spatial sense. In what 

political historian Matthew Jacobson conceptualizes as the “alchemy of race,”2 time and place 

are critical considerations to the discussion of who can be considered white and when. Jacobson 

writes that race, “Bound in a wildly complex skein of political, cultural, ideological, 

psychological and perceptual strands, their movements are glacial rather than catastrophic, 

uneven rather than linear or steady.”3 What is commonly accepted as being white today, for 

example, is very different from what was considered white a century ago. That same fluidity 

applies equally to regionality—what is considered white in some places, is not in others. The 

underlying historical logic that frames the creation of race centers on two fundamental 

28 

ideologies, capitalism and republicanism,4 both of which are prisms through which one can view 

the history of immigration.  

Histories are complex, nuanced, and interconnected. The history of any people, place, 

event, period, issue or object is never just about that one singular subject in isolation of the 

perspectives, forces or mechanisms that contributed to their construction. The history of steel in 

the U.S., for example, embodies the cultural and sociological conflicts of race as much as it does 

economic forces and urbanization.5,6,7 The agents, actors, and witnesses of the transformation of 

the urban landscape are forged into its narrative like the rivets holding together the towering 

structures of the modern world. Much has been written about the struggles and experiences of 

Chinese and European immigrants to the U.S. from varied perspectives. For example, there are 

Erica Rand’s exploration of morality, sexuality and exploitation at Ellis Island; Erika Lee and 

Judy Yung’s explication of American exceptionalism and its effect on notions of Asian 

inferiority; and Anna Pegler-Gordon’s extensive examination of the interconnectedness of 

photography and immigration policy. Each of these works provides perspectives that are critical 

to our understanding of immigration in a historical context. Through providing this critical 

context, the current body of knowledge helps inform the argument that photography not only 

served as a catalyst and reinforcement to exclusionary policies, but also served as a means to 

surveil those who the policies were designed to exclude.   

Race and immigration were entwined and solidified in the ideology of U.S. citizenship 

with passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790. Enacted during the second session of the first 

Congress, the law established the criterion of “any alien, being a free white person”8 as being 

eligible to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. This phrase manifests from republican ideology 

that citizens should be civilized, therefore able to govern themselves. Those seven words—any 

29 

alien, being a free white person—catalyzed the importance of race and the notion that certain 

races of immigrants possessed the requisite character necessary for self-governance, and others 

did not, making them racially undesirable by historical conventions of whiteness. Countering the 

republican idealism of self-governing civility, however, is the nation-building force of capitalism 

that requires an abundance of cheap labor to ensure growth and prosperity.9 It is within the 

tension between these two principles that the alchemy of race exists. This tension, the ebb and 

flow between the conflicting forces of republicanism and capitalism, is the lens through which 

the following discussion should be viewed. Discussing the social, economic and political forces 

that existed during this period establishes a context in order to understand the conditions in 

which the photographs under investigation were made.       

CAPITALISM AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY 

The industrial revolution came late to the U.S. in comparison to the rest of the developing 

world. While much of Europe was adopting new processes and technologies to make the 

production of goods more efficient, similar growth lagged in the U.S. through much of the early 

19th century.10 When industrialization did arrive in the U.S., it came with rapid growth and 

innovation. Advancements in the production of machinery, chemicals and raw materials used in 

everything from agriculture to the production of goods catalyzed industry and the need for labor 

to support it. Fulfillment of this need for labor came with a caveat in the form of a contrived 

social contract. In exchange for low wages and poor working conditions, immigrants would 

benefit from the elasticity of race. What it meant to be white stretched; it expanded in the early to 

mid-19th century to accommodate newly arriving European laborers, comprised mainly of Irish 

Catholics.11 This new-found inclusivity into whiteness, however, was superficial, and applicable 

only to their eligibility for naturalization, not to social and cultural acceptance.12 It was the 

30 

consequences of this social contract between industry and immigrant, that Hine turned his eye 

toward after his work at Ellis Island.  

Armed with the egalitarian perspective, Hine began to document the working and living 

conditions of laborers, many of them immigrants.  Between 1907 and 1920, Hine documented 

life in the slums of Washington, D.C, the effects of war in Europe, the relationship between man 

and machines and the development of the industrial urban landscape. Throughout his career, 

Hine’s aesthetic began to change as he became more disenfranchised with the direction of the 

modern world around him.13 The shift in perspective and the focus of his work can best be 

illustrated by examining his work prior to the 1920s, and his work after. Of this transformation 

Gutman wrote: 

When Hine saw these “un-natural” industrial by-products choking off the “natural,” new 
urban growth, he turned angrily upon the environment surrounding him, traveling twelve 
thousand miles in the United States alone in 1913. However, a person—child or adult—
found his relationship to the new industrial world, Hine photographed it. Sweeping. 
Baking. Waiting. Shipping. Houseworking. Carrying. Arriving. Existing.14 

Although still aiming to illuminate the social condition, his work after the 1920s began to focus 

less on righting what he saw as wrong with society and instead focused more on what he saw 

was right, such as celebrating laborers as a heroic embodiment of American society. What is 

relevant for the present discussion is Hine’s pre-1920s focus on bringing the plight of immigrants 

and their worth to society to the forefront of public discourse. For example, his image titled 

“Breaker boys, coal mine, 1911” (Figure 9), depicts a group of weary young men and boys 

huddled on coal car tracks. Black soot smeared across their faces throughout the course of long 

and laborious workday conceals evidence of their racial and individual identities. In the 

photograph, viewers stare into a darkened void, a mass of faceless workers, a commodity whose 

only value is measured by economic output, not individualism. This image is symbolic of the 

31 

powerful force of capitalism and reveals its ability to suppress, mask or even transform the 

conventions of race within society in order to meet its needs.  

To illustrate the entwined relationship between labor and immigration, the 1917 National 

Geographic article references the Calumet copper mines of Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. 

“Twenty different races share in its population, and not even Babel heard more tongues.” The 

reference to Babel from the book of Genesis underscores the deep Anglo-Protestant traditions 

that are foundational in nativist ideology. It is said that Babel was the meeting place for all the 

descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth to reunite after being scattered and forming their own 

nations after the great flood.15 The article continues, “in New York the foreigners colonize, as on 

the East Side; in Calumet it is the native population that colonizes, the American colony there 

being known as Houghton.”16 This suggests that despite the value immigrants have to industry, 

there was a perceived risk of immigrants outnumbering natives especially when large 

populations migrate outside the industrial eastern corridor in search of work. In this case the 

transformation of race does have its limits, especially when confronted with societal demands for 

civility.   

In the mid-19th century as the newly-minted white immigrant workforce was laboring 

away in the northeast industrial corridor, tens of thousands of Asians were arriving on the west 

coast. Some were eager for work helping to build the nation’s vast railway infrastructure to 

transport mass produced goods, while others were hoping to strike it rich in mining during the 

U.S. gold rush.17 More efficient means of production, however, brought by decades of innovation 

and labor expansion lead to a disparity by the century’s end between the robust supply of goods 

and the nation’s demand for them. This disparity led to a slowing of the nation’s economy in the 

1870s, including the need for rapid construction of infrastructure to connect the coasts. The 

32 

economic downturn continued, deepening into a depression by 1882. Between 1884 and 1886, 

wages decreased, and U.S. unemployment escalated, having a devastating effect on the nation’s 

workforce comprised, in large part, of immigrant laborers. The economic depression led many to 

begin questioning the nation’s immigration policies and began forging a connection between 

economics and protectionist ideologies.  

“NEW IMMIGRANTS” AND THE RISE OF NATAVIST VIEWPOINTS 

While separate forces, the principles of republicanism and self-governance along with 

conventions of race and economic fears that immigration would pollute American standards of 

whiteness and rob natives of economic opportunity, worked in concert with one another to 

orchestrate a rise in the nativist movement. The 1880s saw a shift in immigration from Europe. 

European immigration prior to the Depression differed from European immigration during and 

after the Depression both in terms of scale and of where the immigrants were coming from. By 

1890, immigration from desirable countries such as the then Germanic Empire, Great Britain, 

France, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries, all considered to be highly civilized and racially 

mirroring the early colonizers of North America, slowed considerably. Immigration of the skilled 

laborers and merchants from these desirable regions ebbed and a wave of new immigrants began 

to arrive. Fleeing conflict and oppression from the then Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian 

Empire and Russian Empire, millions of eastern and southern Europeans hoped to enjoy 

newfound prosperity in the U.S., similar to that found by their continental neighbors to the north 

and west. This wave escalated into one of the largest phenomena of human migration in history. 

Between 1880 and 1920, 20 million—primarily eastern and southern Europeans—immigrants 

sought admittance into the United States. Implications of this shift, in terms of affected 

population demographics fueled nativist sentiments toward the restriction of immigration.  

33 

One of the principle fears of protectionist nativism was of losing control of the government 

to the foreign-born immigrants that had been arriving in mass for more than a century.18 Being a 

government founded by white Protestants and wanting to protect that locus of control is the 

primary force behind the view of native-born citizens that the United States was a nation of 

Anglo-Saxons for Anglo-Saxons.19 One way to limit the influence of foreign-born populations 

was to deny them permanent citizenship, preventing them from becoming eligible to vote. 

Debate of over who should be allowed in, and who should not, played out not only in what 

German sociologist Jürgen Habermas would call the public sphere, but in the U.S. press as well. 

Take, for example, one political cartoon titled “The Hyphenated American” (Figure 10). 

Appearing in the popular magazine Puck in 1899, the scene is of polling on an Election Day, 

with a forlorn figure of Uncle Sam looking down at a line of voters waiting to cast their ballots. 

Each of the would-be voters is drawn wearing two identities. Dissected down the sagittal plane, 

one-half of each voter is wearing a topcoat, and either a top hat or a bowler, and the other half is 

wearing some vestige of their previous cultural identities. The caption reads “Uncle Sam—Why 

should I let these freaks cast a whole vote when they are only half Americans?” 

Another fear that fueled the protectionist ideology of nativists was that because of the 

economic depression, the U.S. needed to take measures to ensure that economic opportunities 

were available first for native-born citizens. The Irish were able to enjoy the elasticity of 

whiteness in being granted the ability to become naturalized, thus vote, because of their 

willingness to accept low wages and deplorable working conditions. Asians, along with eastern 

and southern European immigrants, however, tested the limits of the elasticity of race. There is a 

contradictory reciprocity inherent within the nature of racial inclusivity. Exclusion must first 

exist as a condition before there can be inclusion, otherwise it would be a null process. In other 

34 

words, in order to include some races within the nebulous lexicon of whiteness, others must 

inherently be excluded, otherwise the construction of race collapses. It is through the logic of 

othering—similar in process to the casting of freed slaves, Native Americans and Asians, into 

distinct non-white racial categories—that the new wave of immigrants from eastern and southern 

Europe found themselves being categorized as racially, or culturally undesirable. Of this notion 

of othering historian and American culture scholar John Higham wrote, “An initial distrust, 

compounded largely out of their (the immigrants) culture and appearance, swelled into a pressing 

sense of menace, into hatred, and into violence.”20 One of the ways hatred of the new immigrants 

manifested was in the unfounded development of stereotypes, meant to justify harsh treatment 

and discrimination toward immigrants. Stereotypes were not a new convention, for example it 

was a long-held protestant belief that the Irish were subversive papists whose loyalties were with 

the Pope in Rome.21 However, new stereotypes were needed in order to match the racial or 

cultural characteristics of the present crop of immigrants. Notions that Jews were inherently 

greedy and intent on world domination, that Slavs were untamable savages and Italians 

unrelenting assassins, were invented to underscore the hierarchy of race, and place these 

ethnicities well outside the bounds of whiteness. This practice, Jacobson suggests is an exercise 

in sorting and distinguishing racial types by the republicanism logic of “civilization versus 

barbarianism or savagery, or Christianity versus heathendom.”22 This binary either/or status of 

immigrants at the turn of the 20th century codified nativist sentiments propagating the view that 

“each of the south and eastern European groups appeared as a particularly insidious 

representation of the whole foreign menace.”23  

The foreign menace, not just European but also Asian immigration, is aptly depicted in a pair 

of political cartoons, one produced in 1865 (Figure 11), the other from 1919 (Figure 12).  The 

35 

first depicts two immigrants, one Irish and one Chinese, devouring a third individual wearing 

stripped pants. The title of the cartoon “The Greatest Fear of the Period” and caption “That 

Uncle Sam may be Swallowed by Foreigners,” are indicative of the fear that America’s racial 

identity was being compromised by immigrants. The second cartoon, appearing nearly 40 years 

later in Puck magazine, echoes and reinforces these fears. This cartoon, titled “We Can’t Digest 

the Scum,” depicts a man, presumably also Uncle Sam, holding a large ladle standing next to a 

caldron with the words “The World’s Melting Pot” written on the side. Inside the pot is a frothy 

concoction that appears to be boiling over, containing phrases such as “Bolshevism,” “The Mad 

Notions of Europe,” “Anarchy” and “Un-American Ideals.” The perceived threat of the Asian 

and European menace was manifested in the form of pressure from various politically connected 

nationalist groups on politicians to protect American idealism and identity.  

PHOTOGRAPHS AS RACIAL TOPOLOGY 

Sherman’s photographs continue the work of political cartoons in propagating racial 

stereotypes by creating a pictorial topology of ethnic immigrant types. Evidence of this typology 

in the public sphere is in the use of his photographs to illustrate immigration narratives presented 

by the press. A 1907 National Geographic article “Some of Our Immigrants,” connects 

Sherman’s photographs to anti-immigrant sentiments of the period. The article begins, “The 

following series of illustrations, showing different types of the immigrants who are now pouring 

into the United States in even greater numbers than in 1905 and 1906.”24 National Geographic 

uses Sherman’s photographs to directly illustrate a perceived problem with immigration. Page 

after page of Sherman’s photographs are entwined with descriptions of the geographic 

distribution of immigrants trying to enter the U.S. along with nativist tomes of racial mixing that 

36 

appear throughout the 18-page spread. The last three pages of the spread clearly represent the 

way in which Sherman’s photographs illustrate historical sentiments toward eastern and southern 

Europeans. A group of 13 immigrants labeled as “Servian Gypsies” appears on page 331 of the 

magazine (Figure 13). The family consists of four adult males standing stoically behind four 

adult females sitting on what appears to be a bench somewhere on the grounds of Ellis Island. 

There are also five children in the photograph, two of them sitting on the ground in front of the 

women, two of them sitting on the laps of two of the females, and one sitting on the bench in 

between two of the females. All of them are expressionless, and a few appear disoriented as they 

gaze off in different directions. This same photograph also appeared in the 1917 National 

Geographic article “Our Foreign Born Citizens,” which over the course of 36 pages echoed and 

reinforced many of the same nativist themes of the 1907 essay. On the opposite page of the 

spread a photograph appears of a much more vibrant and lively scene compared to the subdued 

and downtrodden Romani people. This photograph (Figure 14) titled “Children’s Roof Garden, 

Ellis Island” depicts a mass of children, many waving American flags while others play on 

wagons, carts and bicycles. Though there are no visible plants or trees or any assemblage of an 

actual garden as the title of the photograph suggests, it is a cheery scene on the surface. The 

caption, however, that reads “here the immigrant children, who are temporarily detained, romp 

and play until their parents or guardians come for them,” reveals reality of the scene being 

shown.  

After immigrants arriving at Ellis Island completed their initial inspection they were 

directed to “the stairs of separation” positioned at the end of the great hall. Those directed to the 

left side of the stairs were bound for quarantine, detainment or further interrogation; those 

directed down the center of the stairs had been granted admission and were off to board ferry 

37 

boats to Manhattan and their new lives; and those sent to the right, were denied entry and 

assembled for deportation.25 Those ordered to the right side of the stairs are the subject of the 

photograph appearing on the last page of the 1907 National Geographic spread. This photograph 

(Figure 14) captioned “Excluded Gypsies about to be Deported” shows a large group of 

immigrants clutching their possessions as they wait outside the Ellis Island immigration station 

after being denied entry. Close examination of their clothes reveals that some of the immigrants 

waiting in line to board the ferry back to the docks of the ocean liners that brought them to the 

U.S. appear to be the same immigrants pictured in the posed group photo (Figure 13) two pages 

prior. The same photograph of the posed Romani group also appears in The New York Times 

1905 (Figure 15) appearing with the caption “Hungarian Gypsies All Of Whom Were 

Deported…” confirms that they were denied entry. The article “Four Years of Progress at Ellis 

Island,” directly praises the accomplishments of commissioner Williams in his efforts to improve 

efficiencies, cast out corruption and crack down on undesirable types of immigrants.  

The page the article appears on is an interesting case study and is symbolic of both the 

atmosphere of change in immigration policy as well as a change in the way immigrants were 

being shown. Sherman’s photograph of the Romas was arranged with photographs of other 

ethnic immigrant groups—one group from Holland and one from Romania— along with photos 

and illustrations of Ellis Island in a large collage that is the dominate feature of the page. In the 

center of the collage, a drawn likeness of commissioner Williams holds these other images 

together as if he is the glue or rivet without which everything would fall apart. The mixing of 

drawing and photograph is emblematic of the shift from the press’ use of line drawing to the 

photographic medium. Shifting to the use of photography allowed immigrants to be shown with 

much more clarity, and with much more detail to accurately illustrate their perceived differences.  

38 

Photographs of Williams did exist at the time but using a drawing to represent him in this collage 

instead of a photograph suggests that while he was the focus of the article, visual attention 

needed to be paid to the immigrants being represented in the photographic topology Sherman 

was creating to illustrate the right and wrong type of immigrant. The article quotes Williams as 

saying, “a strict execution of our present laws makes it possible to keep out what may be termed 

the worst riff-raff of Europe.” William’s use of Sherman’s photographs in this and other 

publications reinforces his ardent support of restrictive immigration policy. While Sherman’s 

entire body of work is selective and subjective by nature, the photographs found in Williams’ 

personal collection in particular are even more restrictive in their view. This restrictive view of 

immigration is in line with nativist views. In the article, Williams continues on calling for even 

more exclusion:  

But these laws do not reach a large body of immigrants who, while not riff raff, are yet 
generally undesirable, because unintelligent, of low vitality, of poor physique, able to 
perform only the cheapest kind of manual labor, desiring to locate almost exclusively in 
the cities, by their competition tending to reduce the standard of living of the American 
wage-worker, and unfitted, morally or mentally, for good citizenship. 

Whether directly or indirectly because of this call, Congress over the following two 

decades passed a series of new laws, aimed at excluding this “large body of immigrants.” 

ACTS OF EXCLUSION: IMMIGRATION POLICY 1900–1924 

Prior to 1891, immigration was a state-based process. Individual states were tasked with 

setting standards for inspections, intake processes, admittance criteria and deportation.26 It was 

an ad-hoc system that lacked consistency and proper oversight. The Immigration Act of 1891 

federalized immigration for the first time in U.S. history. The act established the Bureau of 

Immigration, housed within the U.S. Department of Treasury, a testament to immigrants being 

39 

viewed as a commodity at the time. The Bureau of Immigration was charged with deporting 

illegal aliens and enforcing U.S. immigration law.27 With immigration becoming standardized 

under the newly formed federal bureaucracy, enactment of restrictive policies began to 

accelerate. From the time the first U.S. immigration law was enacted in 1790, to the turn of the 

20th century, new policy was introduced at infrequent intervals. In the one-hundred-year period 

between 1790 and 1898, only ten immigration acts became law28 compared to the nine, in the 

twenty-year period under examination.  

A series of acts implemented during the first two decades of the 20th century sought to limit 

acceptance of certain nationalities by placing quotas on the numbers allowed to immigrate, while 

other policies produced greater regulation on the ship lines that delivered immigrants from 

Europe to U.S. ports. The nation’s nativists were increasingly concerned with the preservation of 

the country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and led the movement to limit, and ultimately close, 

immigration. Known as the progressive era, immigration was not the only issue scrutinized in the 

national discourse during this time. The progressive era also saw the rise of other movements 

leading to social and economic regulatory policies, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 

and Prohibition. Newspapers and photography played a pivotal role in facilitating conversation, 

perpetuating fears and establishing national attitudes toward immigration. Beginning with the 

Immigration Act of 1903, exclusion of undesirable immigrants began to expand beyond Asians. 

This act further developed restrictions by expanding upon the list of immigrant classes that were 

not admissible. These classes included anarchists, those with epilepsy, beggars or those 

associated with prostitution.29 Further restrictions where placed on those with disabilities with 

the immigration acts of 1907 and 1918. The Immigration Act of 1917, the Asiatic Barred Zone 

Act, implemented the requirement of a reading test for those over the age of 16.30 The 

40 

Emergency Quota Act of 1922, set limits for the first time by way of a percentage-based formula 

on the number of immigrants who would be admitted from eligible classes. This initial quota was 

set at 3 percent from any country, based on the number of immigrants counted in the 1910 U.S. 

census.31 This temporary quota system was made permanent through the National Origins 

Formula included in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which placed permanent limits on 

immigration.32   

41 

CHAPTER FOUR: 

THE AGENT AND THE IMAGE:  

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SURVEILANCE IN U.S. IMMIGRATION 

“The photographer’s primary purpose has been to reveal the individual before his camera, to 

transfer the living quality of that individual to his finished print … to record the essential truth of 

the subject; not to show how this person looks, but to show what he is.” 

— Edward Weston, 1942 

Penned in a Complete Photographer magazine essay, Weston’s notion of portraiture is 

essential in describing and understanding the photographs examined in this thesis. His assertion 

that a portrait must transcend mere description to embody the spirit, character and manner in 

which the subject lives is challenging to reconcile with the visual record presented in both the 

Robinson and Williams photographic collections. In both collections, photographs read more like 

they are the visual representation of objects, catalogued away for reference, rather than artfully 

crafted visual narratives illuminating the experience of immigrants entering the U.S. hoping to 

forge a new life for themselves and their families. The lack of visual narrative in this regard is 

striking when Sherman’s work is compared to Hine’s work at Ellis Island. By comparison, two 

photographs of immigrant families illustrate the stark contrast between the presence and absence 

of narrative in the work of these two photographers. Made in 1905, Hine’s “Mother and Child–

Italian, Ellis Island” (Figure 16) represents the complexity of family dynamics against the 

backdrop of emotional struggle and cultural alienation. The photograph shows a young girl being 

comforted by her mother as she sits on her lap outside a detention cell in Ellis Island’s Great 

Hall. The girl’s face radiates as it emerges from the darkness of the scarf carefully wrapped 

around her head. Her eyes are turned upward to meet the calming expression of concern that 

hangs on the mother’s face, as she is consoled. Behind them, the chain-link enclosure of a 

42 

detention cell separates the mother and child from the amassed immigrants waiting to be 

processed. In the caption, Hine writes, “This beautiful mother and child sit outside a detention 

cell. Sometimes 1,700 immigrants were crowded into a room which was built to accommodate 

600.”1  Whether it is the noise and chaos of overcrowding, or the uncertainty surrounding their 

future that drives this child into her mother’s arms, their familial connection and the movement 

of their posture is reminiscent of the classic renaissance motif of Madonna and Child (Figure 17). 

Through Hine’s photograph something is learned of the subjects’ relationship with one 

another. He is able to show closeness—the emotional bond felt between this woman and her 

daughter at an important and transitional period in their lives. The photograph is an exemplary 

example of success in achieving Weston’s notion of transferring living qualities to finished print. 

Sherman’s 1902 photograph titled “Gypsy Family” (Figure 18), by comparison, fails to achieve 

the same level of success in capturing the essential truth of his subjects. The photograph depicts 

a family of five Serbian immigrants: a mother, a father and three children. Standing, the mother 

holds what appears to be the youngest child in her arms. As she smiles, her eyes roll to one side 

looking to the right of the frame. Beside her the man sits void of expression, hands rested on his 

knees, his head turned slightly as he gazes in the opposite direction as the woman. All three 

children—the one being held, the other two sitting on the ground in front of the man—are 

pictured in profile; their heads turned as if they are distracted by something out of frame to the 

left. These same five individuals also appear in the larger group photograph titled “Serbian 

Gypsies.” Compared to the Hine photograph, this photograph lacks any of the same connotative 

qualities that reveal familial bonds between the subjects, which limit understanding of their 

relationship. The lack of background removes any sense of place. There is no emotion, no 

apparent attempt to capture who these immigrants are or the nature of their experience. If it was 

43 

not known who made this picture, knowing when and where it was made would be increasingly 

more difficult to determine based on the little visual evidence contained in the photograph itself. 

This lack of context of visual narrative is characteristic of all the Sherman photographs found in 

the Williams collection.  

AUGUSTUS F. SHERMAN 

On the surface, one could argue that differences between the Hine and Sherman 

photographs are a result of one being made by a professional photographer and the other an 

amateur. However, both Sherman’s and Hine’s photographs demonstrate a high level of technical 

skill, despite neither having any known training or background in art or photography. 

Photographic technology being what it was at the time makes it likely that there was little 

difference in the equipment they were using to make their images. So why was Hine so 

successful at recording the essential truth of his subjects, when Sherman was not? The argument 

is that the difference was not a matter of professionalism or skill; it was a difference in 

motivation and purpose. Hine and Sherman set out to accomplish very different objectives 

through their photography, resulting in vastly different bodies of work. Through existing 

examinations of Hine, his motivations and purpose has become clear—humanize every subject to 

reveal their value and worth in society. It is through this approach that he was successful in 

capturing the narrative of the “Mother and Child,” the “Italian Family en route to Ellis Island,” 

and the “Breaker Boys in Coal Mine.” Far less has been documented about Sherman’s 

motivations. Clues as to the purpose of his photographs, however, can be found in the way in 

which he selected his subjects.  

To both Sherman and Hine, Ellis Island was a classroom; a photographic laboratory 

where they experimented and developed their skills. However, in terms of access to the 

44 

immigrants that arrived there, Sherman had a tremendous advantage over Hine; he worked there. 

In 1905, Hine was still a teacher at the Ethical Cultural School and made photographic salvos to 

the island when he could.2 Sherman, on the other hand, was embedded in the culture and 

bureaucratic mechanisms of the nation’s largest immigration station, giving him the perfect 

opportunity to create ethnographic studies of the immigrants arriving on a daily basis. If 

ethnography or documentary were his approach, one would expect Sherman’s photographs to be 

rich with visual narrative and show variety, including all manner of immigrants and their 

experiences; this however, is not the case. Sherman chose his subjects based on their physical 

appearance, asking inspectors and interrogators to notify him when unusual looking individuals 

or groups arrived.3 Reliance on receiving notification from colleagues of unusual looking groups 

separates his approach from that of Hine who would immerse himself in the crowds of Ellis 

Island looking for his subjects. Sherman’s inherent isolation and interest in only certain types of 

immigrants defines his visual preference, which has the subsequent effect of radically skewing 

his body of work toward those not fitting the era’s convention of social or cultural desirability. 

Selecting subjects based on appearance suggests that in contrast to Hine, Sherman was less 

interested in egalitarian notions of inclusivity than he was in objectifying immigrants, 

transforming them into visual specimens of race. In total, immigrants from 34 different 

nationalities are shown in Sherman’s known body of work.4 While the nationalities do include 

immigrants from countries considered desirable, these immigrants were also identified by some 

ethnic or religious characteristic that placed them in the classification of undesirable, such as the 

“English Jew,” or “Sami Woman” which shows a woman of the indigenous Ugic sub-ethnicity of 

Finland. In other cases, immigrants from desirable countries were photographed because of 

45 

physical anomalies such as being conjoined twins, dwarfs or giants, or those embodying some 

manner of deviance through social taboo, which also classified them as exotic or undesirable.  

Illustrating social taboo is the case with a 1911 photograph titled “German Stowaway” 

(Figure 19). A man is shown shirtless with tattoos filling his chest and running up and down his 

crossed arms. The largest tattoo is located in the center of his chest, just below his clavicles, and 

depicts the sun rising between the spread wings of a predatory bird flying over what appears to 

be a pair of draped buntings. This tattoo is framed by tattoos of three women, one on either side 

and one below. On his right bicep is a tattoo of a man with one arm extended into the air clasping 

what appears to be a ball and chain. The large tattoo on his left bicep is indistinguishable, but 

below it, bundles of flowers are tattooed on his forearm. His stance is stiff, unnatural which 

makes him appear uncomfortable. Folds of skin gathering under his chin curve up his neck to 

cradle his face making it seem like he is leaning back, pulling his head away as he stares blankly 

into the camera. Suggesting he did not properly pay for his passage by labeling him a stowaway, 

Sherman catalogues him in the classification of criminal, but suggests deviance by showing him 

shirtless and tattooed adds an additional layer to his undesirability.  

COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHS FOR SURVEILENCE 

As a product of evolution, humans are hardwired to surveil their environment and 

recognize deviance in their surroundings. Surveillance developed in humans as a mechanism of 

defense, to search for and identify threats—whether natural or mediated—in order to protect 

oneself and warn others of the danger.5 The historical perception of nativists that immigrants 

threatened national identity founded on conceptions of whiteness, illustrates this biological 

function on a socio-ideological level. By the turn of the 20th century, photography had become a 

well-established extension of tracking and physical observation as a mode for the surveillance of 

46 

threats. In the case of immigration, threat is perceived as the disappearance of a collective 

whiteness, the dilution of homogeneity through the introduction of ethnic variety, by way of 

immigration, into the American population. Through photography, the visual cataloguing of race 

could be achieved, and collecting those photographs could be used as a warning sign that a threat 

approaches.  

JOHN A. ROBINSON 

Cataloguing immigrants through photography is perhaps most evident in the collection of 

Robinson. By all accounts, Robinson was a governmental bureaucrat, an agent of the state 

working on the frontline of immigration by investigating prostitution and the white slave market 

on the west coast. The photographs contained in his collection are a reflection of his role in the 

immigration process and an important link to understanding photography’s early use in 

surveillance. Consisting of a combination of police mug shots and various forms of identification 

photographs, compared to Hine and Sherman, the Robinson photographs are even further 

removed from Weston’s standards of portraiture. These photographs possess no living quality 

and strictly serve the purpose of documenting the physical descriptions of how these immigrants 

looked. Housed in a single archival box, referenced as MSP 1676-1816 at the California 

Historical Society archives in San Francisco, the Robinson collection consists of 32 photographic 

prints all of unknown origin. The collection also contains correspondence and leather-bound 

journals that detail his daily investigative activities. In 22 volumes spanning his three-decades at 

Angel Island (1906–1936), Robinson recorded notes on immigrants and resident aliens, primarily 

of Asian origin, in his journals. These notes include assigned immigration numbers, case 

numbers, physical descriptions, and in many instances, details of immigrant activities or known 

locations. Notes written on the back of many of the photographs in the collection also include 

47 

similar information related to those pictured suggesting that the photographs were used in some 

capacity for his investigations.  

The use of photography in law enforcement has a long history dating back to the mid-19th 

century. By 1841, the development of the Petzval lens along with advances in daguerreotype 

technology, which resulted in shorter exposure times, increased the speed of the photographic 

process making it a more practical means of record keeping.6 Prisons and police forces adopted 

the technology and began hiring civilian photographers to photograph prisoners7. By the 1890s, 

photography started to become an integral part of the immigration process. Passage of the Geary 

Act and McCreary Amendment required nearly all Chinese to present photo identification with 

their immigration documentation8. In addition to photographic identification, use of photography 

for investigative purposes was not an uncommon practice at Angel Island. Robinson’s colleague 

Charles Franklin is known to have taken both interpreters and photographic prints around the 

streets of San Francisco investigating the citizenship status of immigrants.9 His own records, 

however, suggest that Robinson’s scope was not limited to the Bay Area, but rather encompassed 

much of the west coast. Evidence of this can be found in the notes on the back of many of the 

photographs, or records related to them. For example, one of the identification photographs in his 

collection (Figure 20) is of a Chinese immigrant. The photograph shows a young, well-dressed 

man identified as Serno Dison, both on the front and back of the print. Below his image, the 

numbers 12020/19328 are stamped on the front of the print along with a notation p. 22422 

appearing under his name. These numbers are consistent with the classification system Robinson 

used in his journals to organize notes pertaining to his various investigations; the numbers 12020 

in particular reference Chinese deportation cases. In addition to the photograph, Dison also 

48 

appears in a 1902 passenger manifest for a ship arriving in Seattle, WA10 suggesting Robinson 

was not just investigating immigrants arriving at Angel Island.  

A series of prison photographs in Robinson’s collection further supports the assertion his 

investigations reached far beyond the shores of the San Francisco Bay. One photograph (Figure 

21) shows a 57-year old man identified as Eng Jeik. The man is bald, and his face looks gaunt as

he stares expressionless into the camera, an identification slate hangs from his neck. On the back 

“SAN QUENTIN” is stamped on the print in magenta ink, below it appears the handwritten case 

notation 12020/1. Identified as prisoner number 30985, prison records note his nationality as 

Chinese and, color being a key characteristic of the convention of race, includes the notation of 

his complexion appearing “yellow.”11 The record also indicates Jeik was a farmer from Fresno, 

which is 200 miles south of San Francisco. Convicted in 1917, he was serving a sentence of 5-

years to life for infamous crimes against humanity, a designation of the period that signified all 

manner of deviant crimes including acts of fellatio, sodomy, or being involved with prostitution. 

The classification of Jeik’s crime is consistent with the focus of Robinson’s investigations during 

this period. One Oakland Tribune article published on Oct. 31, 1919 (Figure 22), illustrates the 

nature of the crimes he investigated while stationed at Angel Island. With a headline reading 

“Chinese girl arrested in ‘slave’ hunt,” the article details the arrest of an immigrant named Wong 

Ying, and two others, Lum Hay Yung and Lo Slim, accused of smuggling her into to San 

Francisco from China. Robinson is described in the article as having spent several weeks 

investigating the alleged prostitution ring, which led him “at times through some of the blackest 

mazes of which crafty Oriental conspiracy is possible.”  The language used here is characteristic 

not only of the editorialized narrative writing style of the press during this era, but also illustrates 

wide-held sentiments of suspicion towards Asian immigrants.    

49 

The geographic extent of Robinson’s investigations is perhaps best illustrated by the 

single non-prison or identification photograph in his collection. The photograph (Figure 23) 

shows the façade of a large Spanish style building with three arches reaching several stories high 

at the entrance. Two individuals are shown sitting on the steps underneath the arch to the left, 

and two individuals lean against separate columns supporting the center arch, one on either side. 

A large sign attached to the railing above the arches reads “Plaza de Toros C. Jurez” (translation: 

Bull Square, City of Juarez, Mexico). Below the sign hangs a temporary banner promoting some 

type of traveling exhibition. A postcard (Figure 24) in the historical collection of the Ciudad 

Juarez library shows a wider view of the building, which appears to be an open-air event arena. 

On the back of the photograph in the Robinson collection, a handwritten case number notion, 

12020/215, is written along with the name Wong Heong. This suggests he was investigating 

someone in the photograph and that this investigation took him as far as Mexico. This image also 

supports the argument that Robinson possessed these photographs as a method of surveillance. 

Photographs of immigrants identified as Leung Yuk, Lum Choy, Chuck Poy Yuen, and Gum 

Toy all include cases numbers noted on their reverse. One photograph (Figure 25) of a Chinese 

immigrant named Lau Sam, includes a notation that he has a “large mole near his left temple,” 

while another (Figure 26) of immigrant Sarga Sergoro notes that he “hangs out at the Matsuoaka 

Hotel.” All of these notations along with his journals suggest Robinson was visually cataloguing 

immigrants and that he collected these photographs for the purpose of surveilling those he was 

investigating.  

50 

WILLIAM WILLIAMS 

Four years before Robinson began traversing the west coast investigating immigrants 

suspected of deviant crimes, a new commissioner was settling into his role at the helm of the 

nation’s largest immigration station 2,900 miles away. Like Robinson, Williams collected 

photographs of undesirable immigrants; however, his use of photography was different from that 

of Robinson. Appointed in 1902 by Roosevelt, Williams arrived during a time of perceived 

turmoil and corruption at Ellis Island. A controversial figure, Williams represents an interesting 

dichotomy within the historical narrative of U.S. immigration. On one hand he is credited with 

being a great reformer in terms of facilities and process at Ellis Island.12 On the other, Williams 

also received harsh criticism, especially in the foreign language press of New York, for his 

deeply entrenched views toward restricting immigration.13 Canonizing his perceived 

accomplishments, Williams kept a scrapbook containing correspondence, various newspaper 

clippings, and photographic prints made by Sherman and other photographers, all memorializing 

his two terms as immigration commissioner. Kept as mementos the same articles in his 

scrapbook, many of which illustrated by Sherman’s photographs, also illuminate Williams’ 

biases. One clipping from 1904 reveals his views on immigrants coming from southern and 

eastern Europe. The article details how Williams advised the Maine State Board of Trade to be 

weary of certain types of immigrants as they were recruiting workers to populate their state. In 

the article Williams suggests that those from southern Europe were of a class of immigrants that 

were “unfitted to till our soil,”14 suggesting they were unfit for even the most laborious of jobs, 

therefore having no value to society.  

In another article with the headline “A New Keeper of the Nation’s Gate,”15 Williams 

suggests that only 60 percent of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island had the character to be of 

51 

any “value to our nation,” placing the remainder in his view, as undesirable. He also suggests 

that policy at the time was not exclusionary enough in not allowing discretion in denying entry. 

“Of the 40 percent remaining, by law we can exclude 20 percent,” Williams says, “but we cannot 

stop the remaining.” The article—which has a handwritten notation of “American Boy” next to 

the author’s byline suggesting Williams approves of his lineage—goes on to laude Williams’ 

hardline stance on immigration restrictions. The author writes that, “the ‘undesirable minority’ 

will find it more difficult than ever to pass through the gates of Ellis Island under the sharp eyes 

of commissioner Williams.” The reference to Williams’ sharp eyes is reminiscent of Foucault’s 

notion of the panopticon, a concept of a circular prison configuration where one could keep both 

eye and order over many.  

One page from Williams’ scrapbook (Figure 27) containing rearranged segments of a 

dissected newspaper article is key to understanding this comparison. At the top of the page to the 

left, in a large illustrated font appear the words “On Guard,” directly to the right of that, a left 

facing photograph of Williams is framed by a decoratively embellished oval. Below the oval, is 

another cutout containing the printed headline “Common Sense and Deep Knowledge of Human 

Nature Are Applied in Weeding the Unfit from the Fit at Ellis Island.” A photograph showing a 

massive crowd of immigrants upon the deck of a steamer ship is affixed to the page to the left of 

the headline. This page, with the portrait of himself being placed at the top, his “sharp eyes” 

gazing down surveilling the huddled masses below him symbolizes Williams atop the 

panopticon. This symbolism helps contribute to an understanding of how he saw himself as 

being “on guard,” as a lookout, protecting the whole of American society from the racial 

deviance and cultural intrusion of immigrants before him. Edwin Levick’s “Observing the 

harbor, 1913,” (Figure 28), a photograph commissioned by Williams, reinforces this notion of 

52 

him as protector and seer of all. The photograph shows Williams standing on the observation 

deck at Ellis Island keeping watch over New York Harbor. The strong diagonal leading line of 

the balcony rail leads the eye up to a haze covered Manhattan far off in the distance as if to 

suggest that America is an almost unattainable destination under his watch. Within the context of 

the Levick photograph, the panopticon’s central structure is Ellis Island, and the seer, Williams is 

represented as a literal manifestation of the Argus, a fabled one-hundred eyed creature whose 

gaze reach all distances in all directions.  

DISCUSSION 

The Robinson photographs, and those in the Williams collection made by Sherman, do 

not measure up to Weston’s narrow standard of what a portrait is and should convey.  On one 

hand you have the Robinson photographs which serve as nothing more than a visual record of 

what the subjects looked like, on the other you have Sherman’s photographs which fail to capture 

the true essence of the immigrants depicted. Through omission of narrative, the failure to capture 

the true essence of the immigrant subjects, these photographs are more reflective than revealing. 

As bodies of work, they say more about the attitude of Americans toward immigrants at the time, 

than they do the immigrants that are pictured. If Sherman’s intent, for example, were to show the 

immigrants as they were at Ellis Island his subject matter would have been more broad and 

inclusive of all manner of immigrant, desirable and undesirable alike. Like Hine, he would have 

shown their experience within the context of Ellis Island, being questioned, being examined, 

interacting with one another instead of isolating them, voiding out any sense of place. Whereas 

Hine’s work at Ellis Island is under representative or absent of the undesirable ethno-type, 

Sherman’s work is over representative of this type of immigrant. Sherman purposefully sought 

53 

out those that looked unusual to sit for him. That unusualness, however, is a characteristic 

imbued by the American perspective, and conventions of race, not one that is naturally inherent 

or self-evident of the immigrants themselves. The immigrants did not look unusual to one 

another, nor within context of the cultures, communities and countries from which they 

originated.  

Both Rand and Pegler-Gordon describe Ellis Island as an observatory, a looking glass of 

sorts through which the differences among mankind could be observed. This was true for the 

masses who would travel to Ellis Island as spectators, to view the immigrants arriving, to gawp 

in leisure at their dress and cultural peculiarity.16 This was also true for both Hine and Sherman 

who gazed through the lens of Ellis Island with very different interpretations of what they saw. 

Hine chose to see the potential of humanity whereas Sherman chose to see those that seemed, on 

appearance, not to conform to manmade conventions of race and desirability that would 

outwardly signal their worth to society. That Sherman chose this type to be his subjects is a 

reinforcement of the societal norms of being American—of a national identity forged over 

centuries of Anglo-Saxon heritage. The role national identity plays in establishing the broader 

context of surveillance argued is this thesis is one of identification. In order to surveil, one must 

first determine whom to surveil—a threat must be identified. As collectors of photography both 

Williams and Robinson help identify that threat. Both of their collections contain photographs 

that visually describe and catalogue immigrants that threaten the conventions of desirability.  

While the role Robinson and Williams play as collectors is significant, what is more 

important is the product of their actions—the product being the collections they assembled and 

what those collections represent. How the immigrants in their collections were shown is a telling 

clue to the purpose of their creation. Both Robinson and Williams collected images that, when 

54 

viewed together, read like a manual for seeing race—race manifested through undesirable 

immigrants. Seeing race, Jacobson asserts, is tantamount to its existence, it is how race displays 

itself in society. He writes “race is not just a conception; it is also a perception. The problem is 

not merely how races are comprehended, but how they are seen.”17 In other words how someone 

looks—their physiological characteristics; the tone of their skin, their facial features, all of the 

detailed characteristics photography can illustrate—are visual evidence within the paradigm that 

race exists. Photography, with its ability to accurately depict reality in a way no other medium 

could, became a natural and powerful way to illustrate differences among immigrant types, and 

reinforce visual perceptions of race. Prior to Sherman and Hine making photographs at Ellis 

Island, artists such as Joseph Stella18 would record likenesses of immigrants using ink or 

charcoal on paper. Sketches and line drawings in pen and ink, no matter how detailed, lacked 

realism or tonal accuracy necessary to really bring to life the perceived racial differences of the 

immigrants arriving at Ellis Island (Figure 29). “It is here that the photographer has so great an 

advantage of his competitors in the other graphic arts,” Weston writes. “The most accurate and 

detailed drawing cannot compete with the photograph in providing a vivid representation of a 

living person.”19 So, it would seem that the role of photography in state power is one of asserting 

and reinforcing ideological norms of race and a national white identity belonging to the ruling 

class. Robinson and Williams, being a part of that ruling class, were imbued with authority that 

they wielded like the powerful Argus, collecting photographs of the targets they surveilled from 

their panopticon island fortresses.    

Understanding what Williams, as collector, did with Sherman’s photographs also helps 

define and understand Sherman’s role as a photographer and his contribution to the photographic 

history of immigration. If one thinks of Sherman within the context of 17th-century Europe, his 

55 

role becomes clearer. In his influential work Discipline and Punishment, Michel Foucault 

describes a hieratical structure in which surveillance and the transmission of acquired 

information manifested within the populated realm as a defense against the spread of the 

Bubonic Plague. Each subject in the realm would present themselves at a window for visual 

inspection by sentinels positioned on every street. Those sentinels would report back to 

neighborhood officials, who would aggregate the information and offer their reports to a 

municipal level, which would be aggregated and be reported to a regional level, until the 

necessary information was relayed to the highest levels of the kingdom creating a micro to macro 

capillary system of surveillance. The key to surveillance in this system was a visual inspection of 

subjects followed by the recording and cataloging of their physical condition. In this regard, sight 

and how one appeared—whether they appeared to present with symptoms or not—was the 

mechanism for collecting information.  

Foucault posits that surveillance is a “capillary function of power.”20 Just like blood is 

circulated through the body via a network of arteries, veins and capillaries feeding essential 

nutrients to the far-reaching regions of an organism, while collecting toxins and waste for 

disposal. As a mechanism, surveillance collects information and distributes it throughout a 

network of power. Surveillance feeds power through the leveraging of knowledge to achieve, 

often forcibly, hegemony. Sherman’s role in this scenario of surveillance then becomes that of 

the sentinel stationed on the village streets peering up through windows warning all that the great 

plague of immigration is upon us. Sherman amongst other photographers—many unknown—

whose work has been examined in this thesis conducted their visual inspection of immigrants 

through the lens of their cameras rather than the frames of clapboard windows. Whether willing 

accomplices or incidental bystanders in the broader societal construction of race, each of the 

56 

photographers, cartoonists, artists, writers, politicians, advocates, and citizens discussed in thesis 

played a role in the historical visual narrative of U.S. immigration, contributing information 

circulated through the capillaries of power. Sometimes that information, Sherman’s photographs 

for instance, were distributed more widely to society at large through the press making the 

media, by extension, part of the network of capillary power. In other cases, the Robinson 

photographs, were more localized in their use not making it out of the hierarchy of the U.S. 

Immigration Bureau, but still proving nourishment to the growing organism of race and 

exclusion in the 20th century.    

More than a century after National Geographic began publishing Sherman’s photographs 

of immigrants at Ellis Island, the storied publication is attempting to reconcile its past with its 

future through a very uncomfortable admission. “For decades our coverage was racist,” 

Executive Editor Susan Goldberg wrote in the editor’s note of the April 2018 issue, which is 

dedicated entirely to race. In interviews promoting the issue’s release, Goldberg acknowledges a 

legacy of cultural insensitivity that plagued the publication throughout much of its 130-year 

history. In the 1907 issue that published Sherman’s photographs to illustrate the story “Some of 

Our Immigrants,” then editor Gilbert H. Grosvenor wrote: “The National Geographic Society of 

Washington D.C., is doing a work, through the monthly publication of its magazine, which no 

intelligent man or woman can afford to remain ignorant of.”21 Goldberg challenges this claim, 

saying that, “National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained 

in white American culture.”22 To help navigate their reckoning, magazine leadership asked 

University of Virginia Professor John Edwin Mason to examine their representations of race. 

Mason said he found some troubling themes. “The photography, like the articles, didn’t simply 

emphasize difference, but made difference ... very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a 

57 

hierarchy.”23 Mason’s analysis perfectly parallels the institutional conventions of race, 

representation and exclusion represented by Robinson and William’s photographic collection of 

immigrants. 

Sherman’s photographs, and the narratives they illustrated did not simply show race, they 

helped create race in much the same way as other photographs did in National Geographic. Like 

the photograph of aborigines (Figure 30) described as “savages” in a 1916 article, Sherman’s 

photographs of immigrants illustrated difference in appearance and were distributed for 

publication to be viewed with novel curiosity. “We’re all curious and we all want to see,” writes 

Mason. “I’m not criticizing the idea of being curious about the world. It’s just the other messages 

that are sent—that it’s not just difference, but inferiority and superiority.”24 Reconciling this past 

is not National Geographic’s burden alone. A CBS News segment, discussed in chapter one, 

focused on the re-discovery of the Sherman portraits contained in the Williams collection. But, 

the digitization and release of the collection online prompted other media coverage as well.  An 

article from The Washington Post, “What America’s immigrants looked like when they arrived 

on Ellis Island,”25 also focused exclusively on the exotic appearance of those depicted in the 

photographs. Describing the collection as “fascinating” because of the immigrants shown in their 

“native dress,” the article underscores societies fascination with difference and reinforces the 

function of surveillance through the biological need to identify deviance in one’s surroundings.  

In every instance of their publication, both historic and contemporary, the Sherman photographs 

have been used to illustrate difference, to cast the immigrants shown into a category other than 

the norm. Though they were not known to have been published anywhere, the photographs in 

Robinson’s collection illustrate that same difference. It seems then that the effect Williams, 

Robinson and Sherman have had on the visual narrative of immigration is a product of their 

58 

immersion into a culture of racial superiority predicated on the suspicion, degradation and 

exclusion of immigrants; a culture of lessening humanity and othering immigrants into classes 

and types deemed unworthy to “till our soil” let alone walk and live among us. More than a 

century later, this culture persists today. From Trump’s harsh rhetoric calling immigrants “these 

people from shithole countries,”26 to his restrictive executive orders and rescinding of the DACA 

program,27 to violence and the chanting of “Jews will not replace us” in the streets of 

Charlottesville, VA28 following a rally by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, radical 

nationalism is as prevalent today as it was during the rise of the nativist movement at the turn of 

the 20th century. 

CONCLUSION 

This thesis has explored historical and contemporary attitudes and government policies 

regarding immigration, as well as constructed a framework and approach to analyzing and 

interpreting historical photographs. Throughout the discussion, the constructed notion of race 

and how it intersected with social, cultural, economic and political forces in the early part of the 

20th century were used to further understanding of how immigrants in the two collections of 

photography were shown. These discussions illuminated social conditions present in the U.S. in 

the time period of the central actors examined in this thesis. The protectionist ideologies that 

emerged during the economic depression at the end of the 19th century and contributed to the 

ethnic-elitism of Anglo-Saxton nativism shaped the use of photography to illustrate and reinforce 

classifications of desirable versus undesirable immigrant types. Discussion of these conditions 

centered around four central figures—photographers Hine and Sherman, and photography 

collectors Robinson and Williams. These historical conditions helped compare and contrast 

59 

Hine’s altruistic and egalitarian notion of immigration to Sherman’s narrow and subjective vision 

of immigrants as cultural aberrations, rejects or freaks. The comparison of Hine and Sherman’s 

work at Ellis Island was essential to establish how photography was used in the early 20th 

century to classify and cast immigrants into desirable versus undesirable topologies. These 

topologies provided crucial evidence in the argument of this thesis that these photographs were 

collected by Robinson and Williams, in part, to surveil undesirables at the U.S. immigration 

stations at Ellis and Angel islands. 

In the known universe of immigration photography there were hundreds of photographs 

made of immigrants from all of the U.S. immigration stations during the time period 

investigated, and most of them were not examined here. There are photographs made in Detroit, 

for example, showing Canadian immigrants (Figure 31), whose appearance is shown to conform 

to perceived standards of whiteness that meet the racial convention of desirability. This image is 

in contrast to images from El Paso (Figure 32) that illustrate the degradation and scrutiny 

Mexican immigrants experienced in having to strip completely naked—only being afforded to 

demonstrate modesty by a piece of paper covering their genitalia—as their inspections were 

photographed. Where Hine’s photographs and the photograph of the Canadian immigrants aim to 

show inclusivity, the humanity and benefit of immigration to American society, others sought to 

show the opposite. The image from El Paso, or the one of Jewish Immigrants (Figure 2), or 

Sherman’s Russian stowaway (Figure 19), all show immigrants stripped and degraded, 

representations that take away their dignity and worth. Sherman’s work specifically presents a 

continuum of degradation ranging from immigrants as novelty and ethnic curiosity on one end, 

to social outcasts, deviants and biological freaks on the other. But this thesis did not examine the 

full extent of Sherman’s known body of work, or the representation of immigrants at ports other 

60 

than New York and San Francisco. A representational survey of how immigrants were shown in 

photographs in the 20th century was not the focus here. The purpose of this thesis was to provide 

possible meaning as to why two specific collections of photography, one created by Williams at 

Ellis Island and the other Robinson at Angel Island, exist and in doing so help expand our 

understanding of photography’s broad, complex and often contradictory role in the historical 

narrative of U.S. immigration.   

61 

APPENDIX 

62 

Figure 1. Fort Gibson, Ellis Island Foundation. 

FIGURES 

63 

Figure 2. Underwood & Underwood, c. 1907, Physicians examining a group of Jewish immigrants, Library of Congress SSF - 
Emigration and Immigration - Ellis Island, N.Y. 

64 

Figure 3. Library of Congress SSF - Emigration and Immigration. 

65 

Figure 4. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1911, Guadeloupian Woman, Ellis Island, New York, New York, 9 1/8 x 6 s7/8 
inches (24 x 17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, Augustus Sherman Photographs, CA. 1905–1914, William Williams 
Paper, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 

66 

Figure 5. Unknown, French, c.1793, Madame Roland (née Jeanne Marie Philipon en 1754) est guillotine. 

67 

Figure 6. Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1905, Italian Family En Route To Ellis Island, Ellis Island, New York, New York, 
Ellis Island, scenes and personalities, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography 
Collection, New York Public Library. 

68 

Figure 7. Empire State Building and lower Manhattan. 

Figure 8. Empire State Building. 

69 

Figure 9. Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1911, Breaker Boys in Coal Mine, South Pittston, Pennsylvania, silver gelatin print. 

70

Figure 10. Puck magazine (USA) Aug 9, 1899. Opper Project Archives, The Ohio State University, Cartoon Research Library. 

71 

Figure 11. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540. 

72 

Figure 12. March, 4, 1919, Opper Project Archives, The Ohio State University, Cartoon Research Library. 

73 

Figure 13. National Geographic, Jan. 1905, pg. 331. (Page flipped for visibility). 

74 

Figure 14. National Geographic, Jan. 1905, pg. 332–333. (Pages flipped for visibility). 

75 

Figure 15. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1905. 

76 

Figure 16.  Lewis Wickes Hine, American, c. 1905, Mother and Child – Italian, Ellis Island, silver gelatin print. 

77 

Figure 17. Raphael Sanzio, c. 1503, Madonna and Child. 

78 

Figure 18. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1902, Gypsy Family, Ellis Island, New York, New York, 9 1/8 x 6 s7/8 inches (24 x 
17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, Augustus Sherman Photographs, CA. 1905–1914, William Williams Paper, 
Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 

79 

Figure 19. Augustus F. Sherman, American, c. 1911, German Stowaway, Ellis Island, New York, New York, 9 1/8 x 6 s7/8 inches 
(24 x 17.5 cm), Sepia-toned gelatin silver print, Augustus Sherman Photographs, CA. 1905–1914, William Williams Paper, 
Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 

80 

Figure 20. Unknown, Serno Dison, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society. 

81 

Figure 21. Unknown, Eng Jeik, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society. 

82

Figure 22. Oakland Tribune published on Oct. 31, 1919. 

83

Figure 23. Unknown, Plaza Toros C. Juarez, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society. 

Figure 24. Postcard, Plaza Toros, Bibliotheca de Ciudad Juarez. 

84 

Figure 25. Unknown, Lau Sam, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society 

Figure 26. Unknown, Sarga Sergoro, MSP 1676-1816 at the California Historical Society 

85 

Figure 27. William Williams Paper, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 

86 

Figure 28. Edwin Levick, American, c. 1913, Observing the harbor, 1913, silver gelatin print, William Williams Paper, 
Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 

Figure 29. Sketch of immigrants, unknown, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 

87 

Figure 30. C. P. Scott (L), H.E. Gregory (R), c.1916, Aboriginal Australians, National Geographic. 

Figure 31. Unknown, c.1944, Detroit Immigration Station, United States Customs and Border Protection. 

88 

Figure 32. Unknown, c.1917, Mexican Immigrants in El Paso, University of California-Berkeley. 

89 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

90 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

CHAPTER NOTES 

Notes that do not reference specific page numbers indicate that ideas were synthesized from an 
entire article, chapter or source material, thus having no specific page number to refer to.  

PREFACE 

1 Ellis Island Foundation. 

2 Ellis Island Foundation. 

3 Bayor, R. H. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European immigrants entered America. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 
4 Pegler-Gordon, A. (2009). In sight of America: Photography and the development of U.S. 
immigration policy. Berkeley: University of California Press.’ 

5 Messenhöller pg. 6. 
6 Bayor, R. H. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European immigrants entered America. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

7 Messenhöller pg. 7. 
8 Lee, E., & Yung, J. (2010). Angel island: Immigrant gateway to America. Oxford; New York; 
Oxford University Press. 
9 Lee, E., & Yung, J. (2010). Angel island: Immigrant gateway to America. Oxford; New York; 
Oxford University Press. 
10 Lee, E., & Yung, J. (2010). Angel island: Immigrant gateway to America. Oxford; New 
York; Oxford University Press.
11 Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon 

Press. 

CHAPTER ONE 

1 Though Hine’s work did include images made of immigrants in the Ellis Island infirmary and a 
few portraits of culturally “undesirable” immigrants, the vast majority of his work, and certainly 
his most celebrated and remembered images at Ellis Island, were of those deemed “desirable” 
and thus granted admission. 

2 Trouillot, pg. 23. 

91 

3 Trouillot, pg. 23. 

4 Trouillot, pg. 23. 

5 In total 34 different nationalities are represented in Sherman’s know body of work. Those 
nationalities are: Italian, Albanian, German, Guadeloupian, Greek, Chinese, Danish, Algerian, 
Finish, Russian, Boranaes, Ethiopian, Dutch, Romanian, Cossack, Montenegrin, Turkish, 
Hebrew, Indian, Slovakian, Moroccan, Belgian, Austrian, Canadian, Hindoo, Burmese, 
Hungarian, Scottish, Swedish, English, Serbian, Wallachians, Ruthianian, and unspecified 
nationalities unidentified only as eastern Europeans. 

6 Ritchin, F. (2013). Bending the frame: Photojournalism, documentary, and the 
citizen (First ed.). New York, N.Y: Aperture Foundation, Inc. 

7 The known universe of Sherman’s work is 250 images. In some cases, there are multiple prints 
existing of the same image, but duplicate prints are not counted toward 250, only discrete images 
are reflected in this figure. Also there are several individuals that are pictured in a number of 
different photographs. Sherman would often make a photograph of a group, then make 
photographs of individuals from that group in isolation of the group, and in a few instances, he 
would make photos of the same individual in different poses. Each pose of each individual is 
counted as a discrete image and contributes to the 250 figures. So it is the number of discrete 
images, not the number of known prints, nor the actual number of individual immigrants 
Sherman photographed that is used in calculating the universe of 250 known Sherman 
photographs. See Mesenholler, Peter. Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits, 1905–1920.  
New York: Aperture, 2005. 

8 Messenhöller, pg. 7. 

9 Article special to The New York Times. “COMMISSIONER WILLIAMS OUT.” New York 
Times (1857-1922): 1. Jan 16 1905. ProQuest. Web. 28 Apr. 2016. 

10 Article special to The New York Times. “COMMISSIONER WILLIAMS OUT.” New York 
Times (1857–1922): 1. Jan 16 1905. ProQuest. Web. 28 Apr. 2016. 

11 Tagg, pg. 39. 

12 Lecheler, S., & de Vreese, C. H. (2013). What a difference a day makes? The  
effects of repetitive and competitive news framing over time. Communication Research, 40(2), 
147–175. 

13 Pegler-Gordon, A. (2009). In sight of America: Photography and the development of U.S. 
immigration policy. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

92 

14 Lecheler, S., Bos, L., & Vliegenthart, R. (2015). The Mediating Role of Emotions News 
Framing Effects on Opinions About Immigration. Journalism & Mass Communication 
Quarterly, 92(4), 812–838. 

15 Grimm, J., & Andsager, J. L. (2011). Framing immigration: Geo-ethnic context in  
California newspapers. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(4), 771–788. 

16 Grimm, J., & Andsager, J. L. (2011). Framing immigration: Geo-ethnic context in  
California newspapers. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(4), 771–788. 

17 (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/2017/02/09/how-black-americans-protected-
fugitive-slaves_partner/ 

18 Bau, Ignatius. “Cities of refuge: No federal preemption of ordinances restricting local 
government cooperation with the INS.” La Raza LJ 7 (1994): 50. 

19Bau, Ignatius. “Cities of refuge: No federal preemption of ordinances restricting local 
government cooperation with the INS.” La Raza LJ 7 (1994): 50. 

20 Bau, Ignatius. “Cities of refuge: No federal preemption of ordinances restricting local 
government cooperation with the INS.” La Raza LJ 7 (1994): 50. 

21 Bau, Ignatius. “Cities of refuge: No federal preemption of ordinances restricting local 
government cooperation with the INS.” La Raza LJ 7 (1994): 50. 

22 Esses, V. M., Dovidio, J. F., Jackson, L. M., & Armstrong, T. L. (2001). The  
immigration dilemma: The role of perceived group competition, ethnic prejudice, and national 
identity. Journal of Social Issues, 57(3), 389–412. 

23 The New York Times Oct. 16, 2011. 

24 Bayor, R. H. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European immigrants entered America. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

25 (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/jewish-refugees-
in-the-us/514742/ 

26Lecheler, S., Bos, L., & Vliegenthart, R. (2015). The Mediating Role of Emotions News 
Framing Effects on Opinions About Immigration. Journalism & Mass Communication 
Quarterly, 92(4), 812–838. 

27 Grimm, J., & Andsager, J. L. (2011). Framing immigration: Geo-ethnic context in  
California newspapers. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(4), 771–788. 

93 

28 Esses, V. M., Dovidio, J. F., Jackson, L. M., & Armstrong, T. L. (2001). The  
immigration dilemma: The role of perceived group competition, ethnic prejudice, and national 
identity. Journal of Social Issues, 57(3), 389–412. 

29 June 2, 2011 article from The New York Times. 

30 MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. University of Toronto Press. 

31 1971 Summer, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 4, Review Section: 
Poetry by Michael Hornyansky, (Includes review of “Neo Poems” by John Robert Colombo), 
Start Page 369, Quote Page 375, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada. 

32 1970, Neo Poems by John Robert Colombo, A Said Poem, Quote Page 46, The Sono Nis Press, 
Department of Creative Writing, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. 

33 1972 December 19, The Sun, Section 3, Trevor Lautens, Quote Page 33, Column 1, 
Vancouver, British Columbia. 
34 1972 May 3, The Windsor Star, Policy Toward Greek Colonels Found Wanting by James 
Eayrs, Quote Page 11, Column 4, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. 

35 Cepak, A. (2017). Longitudinal Affects of Immigration Frames within a Geo-Ethnic Context. 
Accepted Dec. 15, 2017 to the 2017 proceedings of the Broadcast Educators Association. 

36 Cepak, A. (2017). Longitudinal Affects of Immigration Frames within a Geo-Ethnic Context. 
Accepted Dec. 15, 2017 to the 2017 proceedings of the Broadcast Educators Association. 

37 Esses, V. M., Dovidio, J. F., Jackson, L. M., & Armstrong, T. L. (2001). The immigration 
dilemma: The role of perceived group competition, ethnic prejudice, and national identity. 
Journal of Social Issues, 57(3), 389–412. 

38 Willmann, K. S. (2008). Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, and pragmatism: Photographs as lived 
experience. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 7(02), 221–252. 

39 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

40 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

41 Library of Congress, National Child Labor Committee Collection. 

42 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

94 

43 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

44 Higham, J. (1955). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism, 1860–1925. New 
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.  

45 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

46 Seixas, P. (1987). Lewis Hine: From “Social"” to “Interpretive” Photographer. American 
Quarterly, 39(3), 381–409. 

47 Bayor, R. H. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European immigrants entered America. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

48Governor Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum. By Ken Burns. Wharton Center for the 
Performing Arts, East Lansing, MI. 23 Sept. 2016. Performance. 

49 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

50 Gutman, J. M. (1967). Lewis W. Hine, and the American Social Conscience. New York: 
Walker. 

51 Higham, J. (1955). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism, 1860–1925. New 
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.  

53 Chong, D., & Druckman, J. N. (2007). Framing theory. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 10, 103–126. 

52 Harvard University Library Open Collections Program. 

54	Coles, R. (1997). Doing documentary work. New York: New York Public Library. 
55	Coles, R. (1997). Doing documentary work. New York: New York Public Library. 

56 Berger, P. L. T.(1966) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of 
knowledge. New York: Double and Company. 

57 Barthes, R. (2000). The photographic message. Theorizing communication: readings across 
traditions, 191–199. 

58 Tagg, J. (1988). The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories. 
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 

59 See Mesenhöller, P. (2005). Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits, 1905–1920. L. 
Martin (Ed.). Aperture. 

95 

60 Perlmutter, D. D. (1998). Photojournalism and foreign policy: Icons of outrage in 
international crises. Westport, Conn: Praeger. 

61 J. Clarke, J. (1639) Parœmiologia Anglo-Latina 90 Seeing is believing. 

62 Pegler-Gordon, A. (2006). Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of US 
Immigration Policy. American Quarterly, 58(1), 51–77.  

63 Pegler-Gordon, A. (2006). Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of US 
Immigration Policy. American Quarterly, 58(1), 51–77. 

64	Lee, Erika, and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America.  Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2010. 

65 Gay y Blasco, P. (2008). Picturing ‘Gypsies’ Interdisciplinary Approaches to Roma 
Representation. Third Text, 22(3), 297–303. 

66 Lalioti, V. (2005). Photographing the “Other”: Immigration and new images of the Greek 
ethnic “Self”. Visual Anthropology, 18(5), 439–456. 

67	Lee, Erika, and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America.  Oxford: Oxford 
68	Lee, Erika, and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America.  Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2010. 

University Press, 2010. 

CHAPTER TWO 
1 New York Times, December 15, 1985, pg. 41. 
2 New York Times, December 15, 1985, pg. 41. 

3 The review includes a quote from Avedon’s assistant stating that his subject selection for the 
project was completely subjective. 

4 Bayor, R. H. (2014). Encountering Ellis Island: How European immigrants entered America. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

5 Barthes, R. (2000). The photographic message. Theorizing communication: readings across 
traditions, 191–199. 

6	Berger, P. L. T. (1966) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of 

knowledge. New York: Double and Company. 

96 

7	Berger, P. L. T. (1966) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of 
8	Berger, P. L. T. (1966) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of 

knowledge. New York: Double and Company. 

knowledge. New York: Double and Company. 

CHAPTER THREE 
1 National Geographic, July–December1917, Vol. XXXII, pg. 99.  

2 Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. 

3 Jacobson, pg. 13. 

4 Republicanism, in this context is an ideology, not a political party (i.e. The Republican Party). 

5 Bossen, Howard, and Eric Freedman. “Molten Light: The Intertwined History of Steel and 
Photography”—The Roles of Oral Histories and Other First-Person Accounts.” The Oral History 
Review 39.1 (2012): 1–14. 

6 Bossen, H., Freedman, E., & Mianecki, J. (2013). Hot Metal, Cold Reality: Photographers’ 
Access to Steel Mills. Visual Communication Quarterly, 20(1), 4–19. 

7 Bossen, H., & Freedman, E. (2015). Making Steel, Making Prosperity, Making Pollution, 
Making Images: The Environmental Photography of Steel Mills. Visual Communication 
Quarterly, 22(2), 71–84. 

8 Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection; Portfolio 213, Folder 10. 

9 Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. 

10 Higham, J. (2002). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism, 1860–1925. Rutgers 
University Press. 

11 Jacobson, pg. 19. 

12 Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color. Harvard University Press. 

13 Hine, L. W., & Gutman, J. M. (1974). Lewis W. Hine, 1874–1940: two perspectives (Vol. 4). 
Penguin (Non-Classics). 

14 Gutman, pg. 8. 

15 Genesis 10:5. 

97 

16 National Geographic, July–December1917, Vol. XXXII Pg. 111. 

17 Lee, E., & Yung, J. (2010). Angel island: Immigrant gateway to America. Oxford University 
Press. 

18 Higham, pg. 97. 

19 Jacobson, pg. 23. 

20 Higham, pg. 89. 

21 Higham, pg. 89. 

22 Jacobson, pg. 31. 

23 Higham, pg. 92. 

24 National Geographic, January 1907, Vol. X III, pg. 317. 

25 Researchers field notes, site visit to Ellis Island, July, 2016. 

26 Hing, pg. 12. 

27 Hing, pg. 12. 

28 Hing, pg. 12. 

29 Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection. 

30 Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection. 

31 Hing, pg. 62. 

32 Hing, pg. 68. 

CHAPTER FOUR 

1 The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography 
Collection, The New York Public Library. (1905). Mother and child, Italian Ellis Island, 1905. 

2 Gutman, pg. 8. 

3 Messenhöller, pg. 14. 

98 

4 Those nationalities are: Italian, Albanian, German, Guadeloupian, Greek, Chinese, Danish, 
Algerian, Finish, Russian, Boranaes, Ethiopian, Dutch, Romanian, Cossack, Montenegrin, 
Turkish, Hebrew, Indian, Slovakian, Moroccan, Belgian, Austrian, Canadian, Hindoo, Burmese, 
Hungarian, Scottish, Swedish, English, Serbian, Wallachians, Ruthianian, and unspecified 
nationalities unidentified only as eastern Europeans. These are all the reported nationalities 
represented in Sherman’s entire body of work, not just those in Williams collection.  

5 Shoemaker, 1997. 

6 Tagg, pg. 74. 

7 Tagg, pg. 74. 

8 Pegler-Gordon, pg. 8. 

9 Pegler-Gordon, pg. 96. 

10 National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Index to Chinese 
Passengers Arriving at Seattle, Washington; NAI Number: 2953536; Record Group 
Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787–2004; Record Group 
Number: 85; Series Number: A4049; Roll Number: 1. 

11 California State Archives; Sacramento, California; Secretary of State California State Archives 
San Quentin Prison Registers. 

12 Rand, pg. 57. 

13 Rand pg. 58. 

14 Rand pg. 58. 

15 Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. (1902–1910). Ellis 
Meredith. American Boy. “New keeper of the nation’s gates.” 

16 Pegler-Gordon, pg. 110. 

17 Jacobson, Pg. 9. 

18 Stella and Hine were contemporaries, however Stella’s work at Ellis Island pre-dates Hine’s. 
See Gutman, Pg. 8. 

19 Complete Photographer (issue 45), pg. 2935 

20 Foucault, pg. 195. 

99 

21 National Geographic 1907, pg. 823. 

22 Susan Goldberg (In Press, NPR, 2018). 

23 Mason (In Press, NPR, 2018). 

24 Mason (In Press, NPR, 2018). 

25 Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2015. 

26 Comments made by President Trump were widely reported in the press. In a Jan. 11, 2018 oval 
office meeting with lawmakers the President was reported as disparaging immigrants from Haiti, 
El Salvador and African countries saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole 
countries come here?” “Why do we need more Haitians?” “Take them out.” See Washington 
Post, “Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries,” Jan. 12, 2018. 

27 NPR, Sept. 6, 2017. 

28 Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2017. 

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Governor Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum. By Ken Burns. Wharton Center for the 

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