Setting Sail for Truth
We stepped off the gangway into the crisp air-conditioned belly of the floating resort, its ornate walls towering over us. Glass elevators glided quietly upwards into a cloud of shimmering lights. That summer my wife and I had decided we would try something different: visiting the “Mexican Riviera” on a weeklong cruise. We would normally spend vacations visiting cities in the U.S. and abroad, absorbing history, culture, and urban experiences that eluded us at home. Now we were excited to experience round-the-clock dining, nightly theater, alluring amenities, and exotic port excursions—all neatly packaged in one place.
On long days at sea, we tried to make the most of the broad array of activities that promised something for everyone. Yet it was our interactions with the staff and crew that had a lasting impact on me. Endearing and full of life, they would offer warm greetings and helpful advice for getting around and making the most of our time onboard. Cabin stewards, deck crew, dining-room wait staff—we became attached to them, and I began to wonder how they lived and worked adrift between nations. Their duties completed, they would disappear like trails of vapor, slipping away to recharge in spaces amongst us yet hidden from sight.
Alfred Stieglitz may have felt a similar connection to the working men and women whose secluded conditions he famously exposed on a cruise in 1907. The renowned photographer was sailing with his family from America to Europe on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the most impressive passenger liners of its time. As the story goes, he had grown weary of the company he shared in first class. To overcome the stuffiness of the spaces and people surrounding him, he took a walk around the ship, where he stumbled upon a view of the steerage, the area reserved for third class. What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks.
From up on the deck, Stieglitz looked down at a sea of immigrants crammed into the filthy cargo spaces of the steerage—a free-floating urban slum severed from the luxurious accommodations enjoyed by the affluent in the main part of the ship. His head swam as inspiration took hold.
Later he would recount racing back to his cabin to grab his camera and his relief in finding little had changed during his brief absence. The single resulting image, made with his only prepared glass plate negative, proved critical to his artistic development. It also turned out to be a watershed moment in the history of photography, proving a truly modern image could be made with a camera.
In an oft-quoted essay that has strongly influenced how The Steerage would later be discussed by art historians and critics, Stieglitz describes what his lens captured:
A round straw hat, the funnel leading out, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings made of circular chains—white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I stood spellbound for a while, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I felt, looking and looking and still looking? I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life . . .
Stieglitz was intent on moving photography from Pictorialism, a mode that mimicked painting, to Modernism, which embraced the new technologies and forward-looking spirit of the twentieth century. The Steerage engaged with the abstraction of European avant-garde painting through its emphasis on formal design (line, shape, form, and texture) to convey the energy and rhythms of a modern industrial world.
But it is also a portrait of uprootedness and displacement. An icon of the American experience, The Steerage has often been thought to portray immigrants sailing into Ellis Island to begin a new life. In fact, these were people the U.S. had rejected or who had come on a worker visa, sailing from New York back to Europe. Drifting back and forth between the old world and the new, their futures were uncertain.
Toiling in the factories of industry and manufacturing, they helped make the U.S. a leading economic power in the world. They bore the excesses of American business, sweating and bleeding under harsh and unsafe conditions, doing work that was often monotonous, mind-numbing, and soul-crushing. The photograph movingly captures a slice of this nameless multitude, eliciting our compassion for those who grinded through the brutal regimentation of the urban workplace. A composition of bustle, commotion, and clamor, the picture reflects the heightened pace and rapid change of the new century. The transience of the photographic moment, capturing a state of flux, mirrors the continuous back-and-forth movement and shifting circumstances of the working immigrant.
Class and gender divisions are reflected in the camera’s point of view and the composition of the scene. Stieglitz’s camera looked downwards, capturing the steerage at a distance as he surveyed the throng from the first-class deck. The yawning space between observer and observed emphasizes the boundaries between the affluent and the working-class. The drawbridge divides the picture into upper and lower halves. The observation deck is dominated by men, who have stepped out into the salty winds of the world. The lower half is populated mostly by women and children, living in a waterborne version of domestic squalor. Kept at the far end of the ship and out of view, the immigrants’ accommodations ensured the extravagances enjoyed by those cruising in style would not be spoiled.
Today’s cruises bring economic injustice to our cabin door, in the form of real people with whom it is easy to connect. After all, we are stuck in close quarters and dependent on them to ensure our time aboard goes smoothly. But what if we interrupt our pursuit of pleasure to consider how our comforts are possible? Inquiry will lead us to see our place in a system that feeds on the less fortunate.
The cruise ships of our day are microcosms of the inequalities in housing, wages, and working conditions that exist around the world. Attracting workers from countries that have limited economic opportunities, the industry is able to circumvent health, labor, and safety requirements through an elaborate legal framework. By registering fleets in small nations that lack regulations and oversight, and where laws protecting labor are weak, corporations practice what is known as “flying a flag of convenience.” Not bound by the laws of a single country that would hold them accountable, their abuses go unchecked. Taking advantage of legal loopholes, the cruise industry can avoid taxes and keep wages extremely low, even as they rely on federal agencies for services and support. In addition, their influence in Washington has allowed them to get away with illegal dumping and protected them from litigation from passengers after outbreaks of illness, sexual assault, and even death onboard.
Those who work on the ships, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia along with countries in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, do so for six to eight months at a time, seven days a week, in long shifts and for little pay compared to workers in the U.S. They receive inadequate medical care and if injured often avoid reporting what happened for fear of losing their job. If something goes wrong, cruise workers are bound by contracts into arbitration, which can force them to share costs with the employer, with hearings arranged in far-away countries. Sure, wages are higher than in their home countries, but the long, grueling hours mean their daily pay will be low, and isolation from home leaves them without a support system.
The affordability and extravagance of the cruise have made it an immensely popular vacation option. But its explosive growth, power, and influence over the past fifty years are built on the backs of real people. People whose working and living conditions are subsumed into the sunny image of a happy global community. This is the unpleasant truth hidden beneath the tacky opulence of the cruise-ship industry.
But what better place to witness the comforts of privilege being sustained by the oppressed? Our tendency is to turn away from this truth because it is uncomfortable, or to justify our entitlement by demonizing the other. Some believe those who serve them are lesser people. Many of us simply feel we have earned the right to be served. But Jesus’ leadership was modeled through service, not power over others. Scripture describes humility as an opening to self-knowledge in God. Deflating our ego gets us closer to the truth of who we are.
Humility encourages us to put aside our roles in the social hierarchy and flow outwards, joining with the larger creation which includes our neighbors. Romans 12:16 instructs, “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.” And in James 4:10 we read: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”
Humility is consenting to the truth that we are no greater than any other being and that we are nothing by ourselves, “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It is the path that leads to connectedness with our brothers and sisters in Christ. The underlying forces that divide along lines of class, gender, and race make it difficult to see this. But as I discovered, taking a cruise meant feeling connected to a new set of neighbors. Opportunities for greater awareness sometimes occur unexpectedly, and when they do, we must embrace them.
I found the divine flow of shared being in the daily contact with those who meticulously cleaned my cabin and attended to my meals—those whose lives were previously unknown to me. How strange that spectacle and escapism led to the discovery of this truth! But it started with seeing others in an attitude of humility, sparked by appreciation for what the staff and crew did for us and others. Now drawn to them, their mysterious disappearance at the end of each shift was enough to make me question their working conditions and to educate myself on the abuses of transnational capitalism, which became my burden too.
The plight of the cruise worker is a global reflection of immigrant struggles back in the U.S. Lies about immigrants are exposed for what they are when we know the other as our own. When we practice humility rather than capitulating to fear and retreating into ourselves, the relative truths of economic injustice become visible to us. As with cruise workers, the exploitation of immigrants is often unseen and ignored. Though their labor supports our economy and contributes to our comforts, whole groups are scapegoated by those in positions of power who seek to project evil onto those who are different.
The light of Christ shines from a place of absolute truth, in the self-awareness of being. This being includes all the created world, for as Paul says, “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). As members of this shared body we have a responsibility to seek justice, which is to actualize the Kingdom of Heaven in the confusion of the world. Our contemplation leads to action once we have discerned how to respond to situational truths, which are underpinned by the oneness we share with our neighbors. Jesus’ works of compassion serve as a model.
What The Steerage pictures are the complexities that the myth of American immigration ignores. The truth is, it has never been a one-way trip to the promised land. For me, the greatest virtue of Stieglitz’s photograph is that it invites us to connect. Notice how that drawbridge, pulling us across the ship’s space with its strong diagonal, is also radiant. It beckons us to cross—to mix in and meld with this crowd of disparate identities. The Steerage embodies being with others: the distractions, dissonance, odors, and bodies intermingling in communal space—but also the bridges to cross, ladders to climb, and dark spaces waiting for illumination within the incessant movement of our own lives.
Arthur Aghajanian is a Christian contemplative, essayist, and educator. His work explores visual culture through a spiritual lens.