"Ellis Island Ghosts' at Michener Art Museum

"It is the dark side of the island. A place where the huddled masses yearning to be free remained huddled, remained yearning, many permanently, just inches short of the promise land."

So writes New York photographer Stephen Wilkes about the hospital complex that comprises the south side of Ellis Island. From 1998 to 2003, Wilkes returned repeatedly to photograph the decaying rooms, isolation wards and corridors where nearly 1.2 million people stayed after failing the initial medical assessment. Some 100,000 of them were denied entry into the U.S.

"In the shadow of Ellis Island's Great Hall," says Wilkes, "forgotten by history and woefully ill-equipped for its battle with nature, I came upon the ruins of a great hospital: contagious disease wards and isolation rooms for the people whose spirits carried them across oceans but whose bodies failed them a stone's throw from paradise."

In 2006, W.W. Norton published Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom, a handsome volume of 74 of Wilkes's images, upon which the Michener Museum's current show is based.

Lady Liberty in a mirror

The large crisp ilfochrome pictures (prints made from slides) were taken with natural light and without what Wilkes calls "the artifice of the photographic craft," so that he could document the "living spirit of the place." Each is accompanied by a caption written by Wilkes.

One of the most powerful pictures, Tuberculosis Ward. Statue of Liberty, depicts a dirty sink and our symbol of freedom, reflected in a small mirror. For a woman who stayed in that room, Wilkes surmises, "that reflection would be the closest she would ever come to freedom." This photograph, as all the work, reflects the melancholy of Atget.

I returned three times to see the show and noticed that visitors move slowly and thoughtfully through the gallery, as if mesmerized by the scenes of rooms that our ancestors may have passed through. In many of them, doors and windows are the subject. Do they lead out to freedom? Or do the encroaching weeds and vines forever block their way?

In one photograph, a lone dusty shoe remains on a table. What became of its owner?

Hine's companion exhibit

Perhaps that owner can be found in the companion exhibit tucked away in its own space. When the Michener's chief curator, Brian Peterson, decided to mount a show of Wilkes's photographs, he got the inspired idea of pairing them with the iconic black-and-white images of Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who produced a body of work that has become synonymous with the immigrant experience in America.

"My idea was to show two sides of the story," Peterson explains. "While Wilkes engages in the act of honoring the memory of the place through attentiveness to decay, Hine portrays human beings full of vitality with a particular agenda."

Some critics view Hine's photographs as overly sentimental, but Peterson stresses that Hine was hired to humanize the immigrants: "The point is that Hine was not documenting dispassionately, but showing the humanity of these people who were just as human as those immigrants who got off at Plymouth Rock."

This exhibit contains 15 exquisite portraits, all on loan from the George Eastman House in Rochester. Today, when anti-immigrant feelings run high in America, these two photographers of different generations remind us not only of our collective past, but of the need to show compassion to the strangers to our shores.