I don't know many times I have seen this image. It appeared in high school and college textbooks, the iconic image of America the "melting pot" (a metaphor that always struck me as disgusting). I've seen it appended to political pieces. I've seen it in photo books, both of the how-to and how-to-appreciate sort. But it wasn't until last night that I understood what the photo actually depicted.
Alfred Stieglitz was on his way to Europe, aboard a steamship. Being a man of some means, he traveled first class. He soon tired of the company of first class passengers and wandered about the ship, eventually coming onto the scene of steerage passengers on deck. The scene struck him. He raced back to his cabin, desperately hoping that the passengers would not shift from their positions, the man in the straw hat in particular. Or so the story goes.
They had not shifted by the time Stieglitz returned, and therein lies the true poignancy of the image. It is not a photograph of immigrants enroute to the New World and new and exciting lives. It is an image of those Europeans for whom America had not worked out. They are traveling back to the Old World, defeated, and in their defeat, all but immobile.
Stieglitz presumably understood this reality. Part of the marvelous genius of his image is the bright gangplank slicing the scene. It has an executionary feel, as if to represent punishment for the passengers' transgression of believing that it should have been better in America.
I study the image and wonder who these people were. What language did they speak? What befell them on return to Europe? And those children appearing randomly: Did they understand the purpose of their voyage? Did they speak about it in later years? There is something in the image that suggests not, that this event was one of private sorrow.
Did Stieglitz understand that reality?
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