The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Cellar Act), signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson. The law abolished the National Origins Formula, which had been the basis of U.S. immigration policy since the 1920s.
The Act, and the subsequent 1965 Immigration Act allowed for increased numbers of immigrants from Asia, Africa, the West Indies, and elsewhere due to its family reunification provisions — and ultimately had a transformative effect on the ethnic make-up of the United States.
In the late 1960s, independent photographer Katrina Thomas (1927-2018) set out to document examples of ethnic life found by way of the growing immigrant communities in New York City and the Northeast United States.
Photographing street scenes, festivals, parades, dance performances, religious ceremonies, and family gatherings, Thomas amassed a collection of over 10,000 color slides, 15,000 black and white negatives, and hundreds of prints and contact sheets, and donated them to City Lore in 2002.
While primarily created to document ethnic traditions, Thomas’s photographs also indirectly helped record the ebbs and flows of these immigrant communities over time. Thomas’s photographs serve as a treasure trove of New York City imagery during the 1970s and 80s, providing a snapshot of the urban landscape during this period.
Thomas was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College class of 1949. After graduating, she had a long career as a freelance photographer. She worked extensively in Africa and the Middle East, and her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Aramco World, and publications of the U.S. Information Agency.
Thomas began photographing ethnic festivals and parades in the late 1960s as a way of documenting the increasingly diverse nature of American society. Within a few years, she began focusing on weddings, in which she could see the importance of cultural traditions to a community more clearly than in the often-scripted and commercialized festivals.
Capturing the weddings on film highlighted a community’s religious and cultural traditions while revealing how those traditions were changing in a new world. Her ethnic wedding photographs were featured in Something Old, Something New: Ethnic Weddings in America, a traveling exhibit cosponsored by Modern Bride and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia in the 1980s.
This past summer, City Lore archives intern Jeanette O’Keefe worked with archivist Seth Schonberg to inventory the Katrina Thomas Ethnic USA Photography collection. A short film by Eva Pedriglieri explores their efforts and highlights this work. O’Keefe and Schonberg’s work is part of a broader initiative to digitize City Lore’s photography collections, set to begin later this fall. You can watch the film here.
City Lore is a non-profit organization that offers educational programs, workshops and events to recognize grassroots cultures and ensure their living legacy.
To learn more about the City Lore Archives visit www.citylore.org/archives
Photo: Eritrean Wedding in New York City, 1985, photo by Katrina Thomas (courtesy TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections Katrina Thomas Ethnic Wedding Photographs Collection).
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