[bubbly piano music] For many white Americans, this is where it all begins... Ellis Island.

[bells ringing] First stop for Europe's huddled masses, who came to America yearning to breathe free.

Or so the story goes.

It's been cast as a quintessentially American story, one that pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz seemed to capture in a single frame with this photograph titled "The Steerage."

But as we'll find out, the story behind this image is much more surprising -- just like the story of immigration itself.

[bubbly piano music] [upbeat music] Taken in 1907, this iconic photograph shows people, some perhaps Jewish, crammed onto the deck of an ocean liner.

It's an image many Americans bring to mind when thinking about their own family's arrival in the United States.

Stieglitz himself wrote his own account of "How The Steerage Happened" for an avant-garde arts journal in the 1940s.

This was 30 years after he had taken "The Steerage," and helped transform photography from simply documenting reality into a fine art.

In this account, Stieglitz names the liner he was traveling on when he took his famous photograph: [steam horn blows] the Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the most glamorous passenger ships connecting Europe with the New World.

I'm hoping this scale model can fill in some key details outside the photographer's frame.

So this is the Kaiser Wilhelm II?

- This is a model of the Kaiser Wilhelm II.

- [laughs] OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess the original would've been a little bit bigger.

- Yeah, over 600 feet, and one of a class of four of her type.

- [Vincent] In the early 1900s, ships like the Kaiser Wilhelm provided a whole new world of luxury for people like Stieglitz, who were lucky enough to enjoy it.

- It would be like Stieglitz is staying in the Ritz Carlton at sea.

- Hmm.

- [Jonathan] You are looking at these grand spaces that are reminiscent of a top-rate hotel.

- It's all done with such care.

- Right, and opulent, even.

- Yeah.

Of course, not everyone traveled in such style.

It was a very different story for passengers in third class, or steerage, named after the steering equipment that used to run through their accommodation.

- [Jonathan] If you're in the steerage, you're down here, low in the ship, likely below the level of the portholes.

You are confined to your space, other than those times when you're allowed by rules to be able to go out and take the air.

- Mm, OK. - But it would have been in a very restrictive place.

And I think we can speculate that this is the Stieglitz photograph, right?

There's this forward part of the deck... and with a bunch of steerage passengers taking the air.

- So they would've been here, and then Stieglitz would've been - up on this balcony looking down... - Right.

You have steerage passengers three classes below -- literally below.

No better illustrator of class than altitude.

- Right.

Everything else we know about that moment comes from the article Stieglitz wrote in the 1940s, three decades after the events he describes.

He remembers "looking down" into steerage, being "spellbound" by what he saw, and immediately knowing this could be a "milestone" in the making.

- By his own account, he went back to get the camera, to come back and make this image, which he later described as the top of his work, right?

- Right.

To see one of the earliest surviving prints of that image, I've come to New York's Museum of Modern Art.

- Ready?

- [Vincent] OK. - There it is.

- There it is!

Wow, it's gorgeous.

- It really is.

- So this is the closest we can get to the original frame, the original plate?

- Well, Stieglitz actually destroyed his negatives.

So that would be the original original.

And it's interesting that this is made in probably 1911, four years after he exposed and developed that negative.

For most artists, when they make a work that they think of as super important, they're eager to put it out there in the world, - you know?

- Yeah, that's right.

- And Stieglitz, no stranger to self-promotion -- it's four years before he published it... which points to a complicated question of- - Why?

- If he made it in 1907, why did it take him so long to circulate it?

- Hmm.

This four year delay suggests that not everything about "The Steerage," or Stieglitz's account of taking it, is quite as it seems.

And reading Stieglitz's 1942 article more closely, I discover my suspicions are correct.

My understanding of this picture has been completely wrong -- and so is just about everyone else's.

You see, in May 1907, when the photograph was taken, the Kaiser Wilhelm II was not traveling to Ellis island, as most of us assume.

[record scratch] It was going the other way -- it was traveling to Europe, which changes everything.

It means this iconic image of immigration is not what we think it is.

Take this character, for instance, who many people have assumed is a rabbi.

It's actually a woman, wrapped in a shawl.

But if the people in the picture aren't immigrants heading towards America, then who are they?

- Well, they are immigrants, but they're leaving.

So the question is, why are they leaving?

- Mm.

- There were a fair number of people who, when they arrived in the United States, were not allowed in.

- [Vincent] Mm.

- Of the million people who came to New York in this year, 1907, some 6,000 were turned away.

But a lot of these men were likely going home because they had come to America to make some money by digging the subways or something like that.

And they went back.

- What is that story?

- [Mae] Their interest was not to become an American.

Their interest was to support their family.

- Which sounds something more like the immigration experience today, a century later.

That's not the story we usually tell.

We think of people coming to America to stay, and assimilating, or not, here.

- Right, right.

- It's harder to think about people who come and then just go back, or come seasonally, in this period of time.

Was that quite common?

- Half the people who came in this decade went home.

That's a lot.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Half of them went home.

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

- That's a lot of people.

- Mm-hm.

- [Mae] Today, you have a similar pattern where a lot of people come to the United States to work, and then they go back to their home countries.

- [Vincent] Mm-hm.

- It's a pattern that exists in the early 20th century, in the late 20th and early 21st century, and we don't recognize it.

- [Vincent] This makes me see "The Steerage" in a whole new light.

But it also makes me wonder...

If Stieglitz was not trying to document the immigrant experience, what was he trying to do?

- [Sarah] What I love about this is that, I think, above all, Stieglitz saw himself as an artist, and he saw himself as making a work of art.

- Yeah, that's really interesting.

In his 1942 account, Stieglitz makes it clear he's an artist, not a journalist.

He claims that when he looked down at the steerage passengers, it wasn't the subject matter of the scene that fascinated him, as much as its composition.

He notes: a round straw hat... the funnel leaning left... the stairway leaning right... white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below... round shapes of iron machinery.. a mass cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape.

- [Sarah] And I think he saw all of the shapes and forms and their interdependence in this picture as even more important... - Mm-hm.

- than even what the actual subject of the photograph may have been.

- Huh.

- [Vincent] This focus on shapes and forms, rather than conventional beauty was a radical new approach to photography and led to "The Steerage" being called the first modern photograph -- which is just what Stieglitz wanted.

- [Sarah] I think, many decades later, Stieglitz needed to build a myth around this picture, almost to make up for the fact that it took him four years to really celebrate it and give it its due.

It's an extraordinary image.

- Mm.

- Almost shame on him for not having realized it from the start.

- So, does it matter that the photo doesn't mean what we think it means, that it's not an image of immigrants coming to America?

- It doesn't particularly bother me - Mm.

- that somebody would have used it for a purpose other than what Stieglitz was originally making, because that's part of the pliability of the whole thing.

You see something and I see something, and other people have seen things in the past, and those things are just alternative interpretations.

- Mm-hm.

- And each one of them is interesting.

- [Vincent] Given this openness to interpretation, it's no surprise that "The Steerage" quickly came to represent something it didn't actually show... especially in the years after World War II, when the phrase "a nation of immigrants" became commonplace.

- [Mae] In these people's time, nobody said America was a nation of immigrants.

The children of these guys, or this generation, had a big campaign that emphasized inclusion, tolerance, "we're all part of America."

And so, the phrase "a nation of immigrants" emerges in the 1950s.

- Huh.

So this photograph then becomes evidence for a myth [chuckles] that it had nothing to do with - Right.

- when it was taken.

- Well, it becomes evidence of a certain kind of story that is not the whole story.

- [Vincent] Right.

- Because it leaves out circular migration.

It leaves out American slavery.

It leaves out all the people that came through the west coast, through Angel Island.

All the people who came from Mexico.

- [Vincent] Mm-hm.

- A lot of people came through Ellis Island, but they're not the only ones who came.

- "The Steerage" tells a powerful story, as a photograph, as a work of art, as a myth about migration to the United States.

But it's not the whole story.

It's not my story.

It's not the story for many Americans.

To find ourselves in this image, we have to step back, to see the world outside the frame.

We have to see, "The Bigger Picture."

[mellow music] [mellow music continues]