Precarious Passages: On Migrant Maritime Mobilities, ca. 1907

Von: Sarah Sander

Taking contemporary visual discourse on ‘precarious passages’ as a starting point, Sander’s contribution explores the media and material conditions of migrant maritime mobilities around 1900. In the wake of the second wave of mass migration to the United States, a new kind of steamship was developed that shaped the experience of the passage from the ‘Old’ to the New World: the Grand Ocean Lines. Not unlike today, the parameters of this experience were based on economic and social structures. While the great mass of migrants traveled under unreasonably perilous conditions in the dark and dirty steerage holds of the ship, the upper decks of the ocean liners developed into ‘Grand Hotels,’ offering the first- and second-class passengers luxurious voyages on the very same steamers. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous cubist photograph “The Steerage” (1907) powerfully shows these divergent class conditions. The picture, in which new formal parameters are combined with a clear look at everyday reality on the steamship, thus became one of the most important images of maritime modernity.