Two New Time-Life Online Photograph Collections

Children at Ellis Island

Time-Life recently added two photograph collections to its online holdings.  "Gateway to a New World:  Rare Photos from Ellis Island" was posted on the anniversary of the closing of Ellis Island in November 1954.  It consists of 30 photographs by Alfred Eisenstadt, one of Life's best known photographers and an immigrant himself.  Eisenstadt went to Ellis Island in 1950, when American laws had again put heavy restrictions on immigration.  Some of the photos appeared in the November 13, 1950 issue of Life, accompanying a story about the new immigration laws; many have not been published before.

The second collection is "The Brink of Oblivion:  Inside Nazi-occupied Poland, 1939-1940."  These are photos taken by Hugo Jaeger, a German and dedicated Nazi who traveled with and photographed Hitler in the late 1930's and early 1940's.  On the anniversary of the official establishment of the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940, Time-Life posted this collection of 22 of Jaeger's photographs of Warsaw and Kutno (a small town about 75 miles west of Warsaw) from 1939 and 1940.  There is also a link to the story of how Time-Life acquired Jaeger's photo archive.

My thanks to Jan Meisels Allen for sharing information about these photographs.