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Artist's Statement
Ellis Island
From the 1920's through the 1940's,
bits and pieces of my family sailed into New York harbor escaping
persecution and war in Europe, passing through a bewildering bureaucratic
maze called Ellis Island. There was so much pain there, so many injustices
and forgotten tragedies. And yet the successful passage through turned
Ellis Island into a hopeful metaphor for my family, as it did for
many millions of other new Americans. Fascinated by the idea of Ellis
Island, and drawn to the beauty of its architectural ruin, I set out
to photograph the vast crumbling complex that sits adjacent to the
few restored museum buildings at the main entry. Photographing with
an antique camera from the 1920's, I hoped the ghosts of the past
would speak through the tiny hand-ground lens. On seeing the images,
I became aware that those forsaken spaces, although starkly beautiful,
have already been transformed into a facsimile of themselves —
a museum of dust. In response I have imagined an unearthly place where
the present intertwines with lost passions of life over three centuries,
filling the haunted rooms with icons of America's past. Ellis Island
is a meditation on the meaning of American identity, and an attempt
to decipher the many contradictory pieces of our immigrant mythology.
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