John DuBois Photography

Island of Hope, Island of Tears

I am the child of an immigrant.

From 1892 to 1954 Ellis Island in New York Harbor was a gateway for millions of immigrants to America. My mother was among them. This project evolved into an exploration of place, of who came and, of the spirit of what remains. The images are constructs framing past with present while inviting questions of self and our humanity; we all come from somewhere, for many Ellis Island was a beginning and an end.

Ellis Island is the best known entry portal for immigrants seeking a home in the United States. Over 60 years ago the immigration station located in New York Harbor processed its last immigrant culminating nearly 62 years of immigration and over 12 million immigrants to the USA.

This series started from a exploration of family history expanding to parallel the contemporaneous immigration conversation today and examines the current, frozen state of the hospital on the island. Immigrants entering with need of medical treatment or isolation from the general population were housed here. This project is my personal interpretation of a present state framed by a past - a call out to the present to remember who came, from where and why. It has a past that asks for remembrance and a spirit that dwells in the present. Does that past ask something of ourselves today exploring these same questions, to understand that meaning in a more complete way?

Another part of the Ellis Island story is the proximity of the Statue of Liberty which adds a deeper meaning to the words in Emma Lazarus' poem ' 'The New Colossus'. Lazarus commented after the poem's publication that "Wherever there is humanity, there is the theme for a great poem". There is humanity here, in what remains.

THe Klots Throwing Company – Lonaconing, MD

There's a closed silk throwing (thread spinning) mill located in Lonaconing, MD that is the subject of this project.  I first visited this silk mill in 2012 and have made several return visits (more planned).  This work evolved from what was an initial exploration into this project due to a catalyst.  In the basement of this mill on my first visit I discovered a shipping crate stamped 'DUBOIS'.  There is actually a very distant, familial connection to the area but more importantly this serendipity changed my perception and was the beginning of engaging with developing this work. 

The series is titled "Thrown from the Past" and is about this mill (The Klots Throwing Co.).  The factory was representative of the last century's textile economics enabled by labor displaced from regional coal mines.  The lone remaining mill in Lonaconing is the last, intact silk mill in the United States.  In July, 1957 workers at this mill went home on a Friday afternoon and returned the following Monday to locked factory doors.  Frozen, the building sits today as it did that day in 1957.  Mill operations never resumed although I resist describing the site as abandoned which I know is thought by some to be a desirable trait.  In fact, the mill has an active owner trying to preserve the site.

The narrative in the project is that this is a place frozen in time but not insulated from its effects.  My goal is revealing a collaboration of this place’s past with its present within the flow of time.

It was a place where people worked and where small signs of past lives acted out among the machines can be observed like the debris field of a sunken ship scattered on the ocean floor. The people who were here may have left but they are not unseen. I think these signs invite questions about who was here and meaning from what does endure.  It is statement about a past organized, industry from a different time.  And there are interactions with the present.  Artifacts seen at one time in one place would appear later rearranged, elsewhere; objects like tools, shoes and furniture on one floor of the factory show up later in different places. Objectively, I know that they were moved by current day visitors but want to suggest that less objective influences can be at work rearranging this past.

Wintertime Meditations on the Jersey Shore

“Bud Fox: You could buy a whole beach house for that.”
“Darien: Yeah… in Wildwood, New Jersey”
- Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987)

Wildwood, New Jersey is my home town.

And a place I’d been away from for decades.  This decades long gap was interrupted by a brief single day visit during a trip to the East Coast many years ago.  It was serendipity, free time, a rental car, a day trip during business travel.  On that single day trip, I remember the crisp, emotional memories rising from seeing my town approaching in the distance – over the tide lands from the Garden State Parkway – the waving marsh grass, cloudy sky and, quiet waters.

Time marched on.  Hurricane Sandy crashed on shore but somehow overlooked my town.

Memories have gravity and they were pulling on me.  It was 5 days after Sandy retreated up the East Coast that I came back, a trip that marked the beginning of regular return visits.  What I discovered was little had changed – yet everything was different.  I was seeing a familiar place from a new perspective – this summer place in dormancy, waiting for the returning crowds was at rest and revealing a new layer of itself.

These images are from a body of work developed over the last three years examining the surrounds of home in a different way and a different time than childhood memories.  The boardwalk teeming with people in summer is quiet and alone, amusement park lights are eerily on without crowds to use them, the beach is empty, the ocean always at work.  There is also abandonment - lost toys and artifacts from earlier times and travelers.  None of this new but all of it was a surprise and a wonderful gift renewing old memories and creating new ones.