WINCHESTER - How many of us know what the buildings at Ellis Island look like? It's not somewhere that calls to mind specific images. Perhaps that's as it should be, since, really, it doesn't so much designate a place or institution as an idea or aspiration. It's a sacred American site, like "Mount Vernon," "Gettysburg," "Ground Zero." Yet where they are all homes (once for the living, now for the dead), Ellis Island is something quite different. It offered entry to a home. It's a transit point, not a resting place.
'Ghosts' reopens an entryway to America
Between 1998 and 2003, Stephen Wilkes obsessively set about to record the then-current state of Ellis Island's outlying buildings - not the Great Hall and visitors center where tourists go. The island consists of three sites: the original one, Island 1, and, south of that, two man-made locations, Islands 2 and 3. It's these latter two, where the medical facilities were located, that Wilkes photographed.
There are 29 pictures in "Stephen Wilkes: Ellis Island Ghosts of Freedom," which runs at the Griffin Museum of Photography through March 30, and they are very big. The largest are 4 feet by 5 feet. Size may not be the most imposing thing about them, though. That would be Wilkes's use of color, which is rich, delicate, and lustrous. The scale of these pictures gets your attention. Their color holds it. The color is so ravishing, in fact, the temptation to dismiss it as lavish prettiness would be great - except that it creates such an effective contrast with the shocking decay of these interiors. Where grainy black and white would complement the ruination, rendering it picturesque even, Wilkes's colors make the squalor seem that much more unnerving.
Dismaying though it may be, the diseased look of these rooms can be seen as fitting. We think of Ellis Island as a place of welcome and acceptance. It was also a place of expulsion and eradication, with its morgue and psychiatric hospital and wards dedicated to measles and tuberculosis and - scariest of all - isolation. Isolation is now the condition of them all. And there is an extraordinary power to the emptiness of rooms whose great purpose - whose sole claim on memory - was their having been full of humanity.
Indeed, it's the absence of ghosts that does so much to give Wilkes's pictures their great impact. There's an elemental quality to them that's at once thrilling and a little crazed. What Wilkes shows is the collision between light (glorious, rapturous) and solid (thick, collapsing). No ectoplasm comes between the two, not even the ghostliest ectoplasm of all: memory.
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