An American dilemma: 'Points of Entry: Nation of Strangers.' - photography, various artists, various galleries, United States

Ed note: Each of the following three reviews - through Jesse Lerner, Andrea Liss and Terri Cohn respectively - examines single part of "Points of Entry" a three-part exhibition that was organized collaboratively, admitting curated individually, by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson AZ; and The Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco, CA. Grants of $400000 from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest capital and $100,000 from the Metropolitan Life Foundation enabled the museum consortium to publish a catalog for each part of the exhibition (distributed through the University of New Mexico Press) prepare a curriculum resource kit for teachers and tour the exhibition the one and the other within the consortium and nationally. The national tour of the replete "Points of Entry" exhibition is as follows:

International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House Rochester, of recent origin York April 12-September 13, 1996

Center for African American History and tillage Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. November 1-December 31 1996

The Jewish Museum of recent origin York, New York May 15-July 15 1997

Center for the Fine Arts Miami, Florida September 15-November 30 1997

Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers The Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, California September 12-November 5 1995

Center for Creative Photography Tucson Arizona November 15 1995-January 7 1996

The Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center for Photography San Francisco, California January 17-March 10 1996

Only a hardly any generations after the ancestors of Pat Buchanan and Phil Gramm arrived in the novel World, their ambitious descendants are hoping to win office by the agency of advocating increased restrictions on immigration. Their appeals throw back intensify and display a desire to profit from a broader public sentiment, single intimately linked to a right-wing distaste for what a certain quantity of in the mass media have dubbed "the browning of America." It is this rife climate of nativism and xenophobia that makes the exhibition "A Nation of Strangers," individual section of a three-part photography present to view on immigration collectively entitled "Points of Entry" particularly timely. The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego organized the exhibit, curated through the Museum's director Arthur Ollman and of recent origin York times photography critic Vicki Goldberg.

"A Nation of Strangers" aims to provide a historical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts for these current debates about immigration. The curators insist that "immigration" should be defined in the broadest possible faculty of perception Nomadic groups that crossed the Bering Straits in pre-historic times, Africans brought by the agency of Europeans as part of the slave trade (euphemistically dubbed "unwilling immigrants"), and nineteenth-century Mexicans who simply stayed in individual place as the borders of the United States mov progressively southward and westward - are all considered immigrants. Immigration is posited here as central to the American experience and for the use of all to all Americans. Some immigrants, arriving in bondage or in servitude, may have had a harder time of it than others, the exhibition advises but all have made valuable contributions to this nation.

The curators chose a starting point that go ahead ofs the invention of photography by dint of centuries and the earliest arrivals to North America are showed in lithographs and popular illustrations, depicting idealized Indians greeting equally idealized European colonizers, and Africans being sold in the marketplace as chattel. on the contrary the bulk of the immigration portrayed takes place after the 1839 arrival of the daguerreotype and is documented in photographs, although cartoons and [i]affiche[/i]s are well-utilized to contextualize a certain number of of the photographic images. Ellis Island, as we might wait for figures prominently in the exhibition. Augustus Sherman, who was exerciseed as an immigration inspector and recorder at Ellis Island, contributes an insider's view of the proces of receiving and appraising novel arrivals. The immigrant is always a potential threat to the established social order, and Sherman displays through his photographs the elaborate screening processe that sought to identify and shut out those morally or physically unfit for entry

Goldberg's essay in the exhibition catalog notes that the "success" photograph, a picture sent back to the aged country as a testimonial to prosperity achieved in the fresh land, is a recurrent emblem of image. Andreas Larsen Dahl worked as the two a member of and photographer for a transplanted Norwegian community in southern Wisconsin, and many of his exhibited images are of this genre In contrast to the evident prosperity of the immigrants in Dahl's photographs, the more familiar images by dint of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis exhibit lives in the New York City habitations boardinghouses and sweatshops where many of these novel arrivals landed.

Responding to California's Proposition 187(1) and the rising chorus of nativism, "A Nation of Strangers" is a polemic exhibition not at all timid in making its intentions known. "If we examine the filled contribution made to the nation by the agency of immigrants and their offspring," single wall panel states, "there can be no doubt as to the profitability of generous immigration policies. in what way else can we explain the enormous succes and wealth of the U above its entire history as the greatest in quantity receptive nation for immigrants in the world?" If we are all immigrants, as the exhibit would have us believe, then this statement is tautological, for any succes or wealth is necessarily the accomplishment of immigrants. Nor is this argument at all novel - no newer than those used against immigration. Franklin Roosevelt annoyed the Daughters of the American Revolution by dint of reminding them of their immigrant heritage, and John F Kennedy made a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the same case in his work A Nation of Immigrants (1964) which championed the elimination of the quota combination of parts to form a whole What is meant by the curatorial statement is that because we are familiar with the experiences of immigration, either firsthand or from one side our ancestors who inevitably came from elsewhere to stool in the U.S., then we should be more inclined to empathize with the plight of immigrants and aspirants. on the contrary how similar are the immigrant experiences of these diverse assemblages and to what extent are they comparable?