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Virtual Communities of Intimacy: Photography and Immigration
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In this essay I propose to look at the ways in which immigrants in their new American setting connected to relatives, friends, and neighbors in their areas of origin. They expressed these continuing bonds through letters sent home, trying to preserve a sense of intimacy with those who had stayed behind. They also added a touch of closeness through the use of photography as a visual aid providing vicarious eye contact. There is an enticing directness to these photographs, suggestive as they are of a density of information, even though their rich and manifold meanings to those receiving them may have faded after a century or more. All that later observers can do is to try to recreate the role of photographs in preserving virtual communities of intimacy spanning half the globe. Those interested in American photography all know the great photographic icons of American immigration. They can, at the flick of a mental switch, call forth the images of immigrants setting foot on Ellis Island, carrying their meager belongings in a bundle. The images show, in a strange intimacy, the faces of immigrants, in repose, yet in anticipation of the imminent encounter with their new country. We may mention, among many examples, Lewis Hines’s “Madonna of Ellis Island” or Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Steerage.”1 Virtual Communities of Intimacy Photography and Immigration Rob Kroes 8 VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES OF INTIMACY But, as I said, most photographic representations of the immigrants functioned on a different level of communication. They were part of highly private exchanges , meant to convey their messages within private networks of relatives and friends. They added a visual element to ongoing written exchanges and could only derive their precise reading from that context. The iconic photographs that we all know how to read are like the photographs in the window display of an archive storing millions of pictures whose reading has become uncertain. It is an archive of almost Borges-like dimensions, a maze of many nooks and niches, stacked with uncataloged boxes of words and images, fragments of stories that we may no longer be able to piece together. Occasionally there are guides, ghostlike figures, who have only their memories to live by and who can bring words and pictures together again. One such guide emerges from the pages of Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle, an old and frail return migrant from the United States to the old mother country which, until recently , we knew as Yugoslavia. At one point Adamic remembers the day when, as a young boy, he sat beside this old man, listening to him, to his stories about work in the mines and the steel industry, looking at photographs that the old man brought home with him. Photographs of New York: The day before I sailed home I walked in the streets”—he pointed at the picture—“where the buildings are tallest—and I looked up, and I can hardly describe my feelings. I realized that there was much of our work and strength, frozen in the greatness of America. I felt that, although I was going home ... I was actually leaving myself in America.2 But more often than not, such explanatory voices have gone silent. We are left facing photographs that no longer tell their own story. We are no longer able to recreate the recognition they evoked at both ends of lines of communication maintained between immigrants and those who stayed behind. Such photographs have become the silent documents of an anonymous past. Thus, in the archives of the Historical Collection in Heritage Hall at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the center of learning of the Christian-Reformed Dutch-American community in the United States, the [18.191.234.62] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:49 GMT) VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES OF INTIMACY 9 visitor comes upon many photographs whose sitters are referred to as “unidentified persons.” Many of the older pictures are studio photographs, giving us the name of the studio in ornate lettering. The sitters have dressed for the occasion and are photographed against backdrops redolent of luxurious mansions. Whom did these early immigrants want to impress? Were these photographs ever sent to relatives in the home country? Did they simply serve the purpose of an embellished family memoir, in their vicarious display of a life of ease and luxury? We will never know. What we do know is that these photographs belong to an era and a genre of studio portraiture in which photography...