Product Details
Hardcover
149 pages
Aperture
Published 1989
Amazon.com
This celebration of "the gateway to America" combines archival and new photographs with specially commissioned essays to capture the dramatic importance of this historic site. The immigrants are here, as viewed by Alfred Eisenstaedt and his contemporaries, along with excerpts from oral histories that delineate their experience. Shirley Burden, whose photographs have been exhibited internationally, contributes an essay to accompany his images of the island as he found it in decline in the mid-1950s; much of this handsome volume is devoted to a portfolio of pictures taken prior to and during the restoration engineered by the National Park Service in the 1980s.
From Publishers Weekly
Comprising essays and 160 historical and contemporary photographs, this attractive volume offers an accessible record of Ellis Island--both a "Gateway to America" through which 14 million immigrants passed, and an "Island of Tears," where other would-be Americans were turned away, families split up according to arbitrary and discriminatory quotas and individuals detained or deported on account of illness, politics and, occasionally, appearance. One piece, by novelist Norman Kotker, recounts the... read more |
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