Shadows Return to Ellis Island
- 09/30/2014 by Melena Ryzik (NY Times)

In the century-old photo, seven children gaze straight at the camera, looking hopeful or somber, or perhaps simply stunned at their surroundings. They have just landed on Ellis Island.

Their heads were wrapped in white cloth; they suffered from favus, a scalp disease. Deemed unfit for entry into the United States, they were sent to the island’s enormous hospital, where they were studied, treated and photographed. Most likely, they were eventually released, healthy, to their new homeland.

Their experience might have been forgotten, the photo buried with countless others in an archive. Instead, this black-and-white portrait has been revived, blown up to life-size and pasted across a broken window in the former Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital in New York harbor. Light streams through the children’s translucent faces, foliage visible beyond the crumbling building, which has been abandoned and off limits since 1954.

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