Portraits by the Canadian photographer William Notman discovered in an Aberdeen bookshop, or group photographs of first-generation Asian immigrants from the Belle Vue Studio, Bradford (see attached feature), are a reminder of the multiple and complex links between photography and migration. The camera has been used to maintain emigrant ties, promote emigration opportunities, impose immigrant control, create the immigrant Other, and encourage immigrant assimilation. Photographs have documented forced migrations as well as recording migrant workers, migrant adventure, and migrant hardship. Increasingly throughout the 20th century, as photographers themselves have offered migrant perspectives, the medium has become a way to document, explain, and understand the immigrant experience.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a stream of humanity flowed through the ports of London and Liverpool destined for the USA and the British colonies. As improvements in transportation, imperial expansion, Old World hardships, and New World opportunities all acted to disperse friends and families, photography was presumed to have important domestic and social implications. The discovery of gold, first in California and Australia in the 1850s, in British Columbia and New Zealand in the 1860s, in South Africa in the late 1880s, and finally in the Klondike at the close of the century, set off a different wave of migrations, all thoroughly recorded by the camera.
In The Camera and the Pencil (1864), Marcus Aurelius Root stressed the contribution of photographs to ‘primal household affection’, acknowledging that ‘the exigencies of life, in most cases, necessitate the dispersion of relatives, born and reared under the same roof, towards various points of the compass, and often to remote distances’. Not only did photographs serve ‘to strengthen and to perpetuate the ties of kindred, of friendship, and of general respect and regard’, but the love of kindred maintained and nurtured by photographs was, he argued, ‘one of the most potent preservatives of a life of purity, virtue and honor, as also one of the most active stimulants to a laudable and manly social ambition’.
In these times of unprecedented human movement, Root and others were quick to recognize the social role of the photograph as a form of ‘domestic glue’ maintaining the ties of kith and kin across vast distances. Their observations were echoed much later by the 20th-century British cultural historian and theorist Raymond Williams, who recognized the importance of the cheaply reproducible photographic image within ‘a society characterised by wholly unprecedented mobility and change’ and attributed its popularity to ‘the effects of the vast dispersal of families on the generations of emigration, colonisation and urbanisation’. To this end, portraits on jewellery, cartes de visite, and cabinet cards kept loved ones visually close, and single and stereoscopic views permitted the exchange of glimpses of Old and New World landscapes important to those at home and abroad. Karin Becker Ohrn's interviews with three generations of a Finnish-American family in the early 1970s vividly illustrate how personal reminiscences in conjunction with photographs served to maintain this bridge between cultures.
The great transatlantic migrations of the 19th century included not only those displaced by the early 19th-century Scottish Highland clearances and the potato famine in Ireland (1845-9), as well as those seeking gold, adventure, or land, but also aspiring merchants, tradesmen, and professionals, among them photographers and would-be photographers who brought the new medium to North America or took up photography as a lucrative new business venture. Some established studios in major cities, others pioneered photography on survey expeditions to the American and Canadian West. William Notman, Alexander Henderson, and Alexander Gardner were Scottish born. John Plumbe Jr. moved to the USA from Wales aged 12. William H. Bell, who accompanied the US Government Survey of 1872 led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, was born in Liverpool.
With the advent of the wet-plate process, lantern slides, and photomechanical reproduction, photography was used increasingly as a tool of publicity, documentation, and surveillance by governments, steamship and railway companies, land speculators, and others to promote opportunities to prospective emigrants, to lure settlers through colonization schemes, and to attract migrant workers with the promise of employment. Between 1882 and 1905, some 18, 000 children were sent to new homes in Canada and Australia from England by Dr Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905), who created a photographic department to produce a systematic, if purportedly exaggerated, photographic record of the children upon their rescue, and after their recovery, from life on the streets. At ports of entry, where the Old World Other prepared to meet the New World gaze, individuals and family groups, passing through the immigration halls in search of a new life in the USA or Canada, were photographed by Augustus Sherman, a registry clerk and amateur photographer at Ellis Island, and by William James Topley, a professional photographer working for the Canadian government at Quebec City. Alice Austen of Staten Island took sympathetic pictures of the immigrant districts of lower Manhattan. In 1904 and again in the 1920s, Lewis Hine took photographs at Ellis Island, portraying the new arrivals with dignity and respect, at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was pervasive.
As the flood of immigrants fleeing poverty, war, famine, drought, religious and political persecution increased, the Keystone View Company, Underwood & Underwood, H. C. White & Co., and other publishers of popular stereoscopic photographs in the early 20th century documented immigration and marketed images to schools, libraries, social service agencies, and philanthropic organizations as educational sets. And just as photographers were among the displaced and the disenfranchised, the fortune seekers and the gold-diggers of the 19th century, so they were among the wave of emigrants who fled fascism, war, and persecution in Europe during the first decades of the 20th, bringing with them different artistic traditions, political perspectives, and views on issues such as class, politics, and race, which dramatically affected American photography.
If Alfred Stieglitz's 1907 photograph The Steerage has come to epitomize immigration to the New World, then Dorothea Lange's 1936 Migrant (or Prairie) Mother has become the icon of migrant farmworkers in Depression America. The Farm Security Administration's collection, now held in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, consists of more than 75, 000 photographs showing the plight of poor farmers during the Dust Bowl years and the Great Depression.
Whether recorded in pictorialist or documentary style, or produced for journalistic or propagandistic reasons, images of truckloads, trainloads, and boatloads of people, whether destined for death camps, detention centres, or distant shores, bear witness to the geographical displacement of individuals and communities, their possessions, their ideas, and their dreams.
At the close of the 20th century, as notions of the ‘melting pot’ gave way to a heightened awareness of cultural diversity across the USA, the landmark three-part exhibition Points of Entry organized in 1995-6 by the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, and the Friends of Photography, San Francisco, explored the relationship between photography and immigration to the USA, focusing on the artistic and social visions of selected European émigré photographers who helped shape a new style of photography and a startling new vision of this country between the 1930s and the 1950s; the history and breadth of immigration as addressed through social documentary photography, portraiture, genre pictures, cartoons, illustrations, and broadsheets; and exploring themes central to emerging definitions of multiculturalism.
Today, in communities around the world, photography continues to be used to elicit and document the immigrant experience as the basis for a better understanding of cultural diversity. Over six years, Sebastião Salgado visited c.40 countries to produce his book Migrations (2000). Focusing on issues both personal and political, contemporary artists now employ photography to confront their own experiences of migration, cultural change, and adjustment. Their photographs and photography-based installations add to the many ways in which photography has been employed to record the processes of human diaspora, the pain or hope of those who left, the sadness and suffering of those left behind, and the transformations in society, culture, and place that ensued.
— Joan Schwartz
Featured article: Belle Vue Studio, Bradford.
