The bureaucrat as inadvertent artist

October 25, 2008|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

LEXINGTON - The early 20th century had a mania for classification. The more complex modern life became, it seems, the more those in charge - thinkers no less than officials - sought to divide up that complexity into manageable categories.

Last year's "Social Documents" exhibition at Harvard's Sackler Museum demonstrated just how extensive that mania was in terms of social policy. August Sander's "People of the 20th Century," the greatest one-man undertaking in the history of photography, demonstrates the effect of that mania on the medium. "Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920," in its narrow yet deeply affecting way, shows the overlap between the two. Sherman was the bureaucrat as inadvertent artist.

The Sherman show, which runs at the National Heritage Museum through April 26, consists of 75 photographs. They are drawn from 250 photographs of immigrant "types" he took at Ellis Island between 1905 and 1925. Sherman was senior clerk and personal secretary to the Commissioner of Immigration and would occasionally serve on so-called Boards of Special Inquiry. Such boards investigated immigrants whose suitability for entry into the United States had been challenged. Sherman was also a serious amateur photographer, and it was these persons of dubious status whose portraits he took.

Sherman's pictures inevitably recall those Lewis Hine took at Ellis Island, also starting in 1905. (They can be seen in an online gallery at the George Eastman House website, www.geh.org.) The comparison is doubly unfair. Hine was, of course, a magnificent artist, as Sherman was not. Furthermore, insofar as possible Sherman consciously sought to portray his subjects as types rather than individuals. Measuring, recording, documenting: These are Sherman's self-appointed tasks, and he had his sitters wear the costumes of their native lands to designate where they came from.

The comparison with Hine is also misleading. Understood in terms of genre rather than content, what Sherman's images most resemble are fashion photographs and society portraits. Costume and pose count for far more than personality. So not only do we see Finns, Cossacks, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Syrians, Albanians, Burmese, Swedes, Sikhs, Algerians, Slovaks, Chinese, and so on - a veritable League of Nations avant la lettre. We see them as if wearing sartorial passports - their points of origin are that emphatically displayed.

Types are abstractions, of course (so are supermodels, for that matter, albeit with better cheekbones). People are individuals. No matter how typical Sherman strove to make his sitters appear, they remain human beings. Again and again, it's the eyes one notices. Is it her past or future that the anonymous Ruthenian woman Sherman photographed stares at?