At the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, an exhibit by Stephen Wilkes captures the melancholy of Ellis Island. Wilkes spent 5 years photographing the south side of the island, the site of a once-sprawling hospital complex left in ruins.
In one scene of the tuberculosis ward, two sinks attached to a wall of peeling paint hang below a small mirror, which reflects an image of the Statue of Liberty: a reminder that most of the people in this hospital never made it to freedom. In the measles ward stacks of wooden filing cabinets perch erratically on top of one another, some with drawers still open, as if people left in a hurry. Snow has blown in through broken windows along one corridor of the hospital, and a series of 5 opened doors in the nurses' quarters invites us into the past.
I'm struck by these images. Life once flourished here, even in spaces that held sickness and death. Dreams grew and faded, buried now beneath the snow and behind the broken glass.
Immigrants. People coming from other countries always gets messy. Does it need to be so?
These photographs bursting with humanity remind me that it's all pretty basic: other people like us--some sick, some not--wanting to make a home for themselves and seeking life in a new land.
Do we, or do we not, welcome them?
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