Immigrants at Hoffman Island Quarantine, 1901

Despite risks to her own health, Austen would travel to Hoffman and Swinburne Island quarantine stations, where immigrants possibly infected with diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera were held. She produced a powerful and unique series of photographs of men hosing down floors, mattresses entering incinerators, sick men and women lined up on cots, officers’ quarters and laboratories, and anxious immigrants standing behind a fence awaiting clearance for arrival into the United States. Some of these photographs were presented in a public exhibition of the Public Health Service at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Austen would have made prints for display from her glass plate negatives through a process called “contact printing.”