Shadow and Memory
The Photographs of Christopher Barnes
Ellis Island’s Un-restored Buildings
A traveling exhibit sponsored by the Ellis Island Institute.
Beginning in 1986, photographer Christopher Barnes walked the corridors and explored the dark corners of Ellis Island’s thirty un-restored buildings, capturing the haunting power held within the walls of what had once been a busy hospital for sick immigrants and detention facilities for illegal aliens. The images in Shadow and Memory illustrate the beauty found in these spaces ravaged by time and weather. Black and white historic images give context to Barnes’s work, and starkly contrast the buildings in use and in decline.
Barnes returned to Ellis Island in 2006 to capture and document the progress made by Save Ellis Island and the National Park Service to stabilize these buildings and prepare them for a new purpose, the home of the Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center.
Shadow and Memory portrays a poignant moment in time, between the vitality of the buildings’ first use as a medical facility treating sick immigrants and the dawn of a new era, when these majestic buildings will once again have a beneficial use.
To inquire about hosting Shadow and Memory: Ellis Island’s Un-restored Buildings at your institution, please call Dorothy Hartman at 973-347-8400 ex. 23.
To see a slide show of the exhibit, click here.
