Photo Gallery (U.S. National Park Service)

These historic photographs of immigrants being processed at Ellis Island. The photographs were taken by Augustus Frederick Sherman who worked as a clerk on Ellis Island from 1892 to 1925. He took about 250 interesting photographs of immigrants between 1905 and 1925. Augustus Sherman was fascinated by where the immigrants were coming from and their traditional clothing. He usually photographed immigrants that were detained briefly and used mostly dull backgrounds so the immigrants themselves were the main focus. These were not official documentation photographs, merely Sherman’s record of the variety of cultures that passed through Ellis Island.

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