Ghosts Pasted to the Wall, Ellis Island, New Jersey

I kept calling them murals in my head, and that’s not quite right. What I was looking at, walking through the Contagious Disease Hospital, were these haunting, translucent images built into the peeling paint, the shattered windows, the rusty bedframes. They gave me a real sense of what early immigrants must have gone through here — before I even knew what I was looking at.

It turns out they’re part of a site-specific installation called Unframed — Ellis Island, by the French street artist JR. I’ll admit I had no idea who JR is. Installed in August 2014 with Save Ellis Island and the National Park Service, the piece is 26 life-sized wheat-paste images, each taken from original black-and-white archival photographs shot at the hospital over a century ago.

JR pasted these thin, translucent prints straight onto the decaying surfaces themselves — cracked plaster, rusty lockers, broken tile, shattered glass — letting the building’s own damage show through the image. It works. The decay isn’t a backdrop to the photograph. It’s part of it.

The Staircase Ascendants, Contagious Disease Hospital, Ellis Island · Saturday 16 May 2026
FujiFilm X-T5 · ISO 125 · 7.0 sec
XF27mmF2.8 R WR · 27 mm · f/11

One piece is pasted onto the glass of a large window: a group of immigrant children, heads wrapped in cloth, staring straight into the camera. They were being treated for favus, scalp ringworm, a fungal infection that spread easily among steerage passengers. Through the cracked pane behind them I could see a tree outside, and an overgrown patch of plants beneath it — life carrying on, completely indifferent to what that window used to look out on.

Another piece runs up a structural stairwell — doctors, officials, inspectors in early-century suits and bowler hats, climbing the stairs. JR lined the printed figures up exactly with the real incline of the stone steps and the wooden handrail, so the image and the architecture move together. It’s a small technical choice that does a lot of work.

The Waiting Queue,Contagious Disease Hospital, Ellis Island · Saturday 16 May 2026
FujiFilm X-T5 · ISO 125 · 1/4 sec
XF27mmF2.8 R WR · 27 mm · f/3.2

The one that actually got me emotional, and I didn’t expect it to, was along a broad corridor wall, framed through a window opening — a queue of immigrants at eye level. A man in dark traditional dress and a brimmed hat. Women in headscarves carrying carpetbags. Working-class men in flat caps. Waiting, presumably, for medical examination, or maybe whatever came after it. I stood in front of that one for a while and couldn’t entirely say why. I’m an immigrant myself, from the Anglo Caribbean, and standing there I found myself thinking about how much harder this must have been for people arriving from cultures with nothing in common with the America they were walking into. Where would they even end up settling? Did any of them regret making the crossing?

What sticks with me is that JR meant these to ephemeral. Unlike a museum piece behind glass, these were designed to age and fade alongside the building itself, until eventually they’re just gone — the paper going the same way as the plaster underneath it. There’s something brilliant about that. The building is disappearing regardless. The art isn’t fighting that; it’s just riding it down.