Between 1907 and 1917, a man waited at a registration desk in the Ellis Island immigration station while others formed a queue behind him. The Library of Congress catalogue states those details directly and notes an immigration official seated at the desk. The photograph was made by the Bain News Service and belongs to the George Grantham Bain Collection. It does not identify the migrants, their countries of origin or the outcomes of their examinations, so the image cannot support invented biographies. What it does establish is the purpose and structure of the wait. New arrivals approached a government registration desk one person at a time, each waiting to be processed by an official. In histories dominated by totals of ships and arrivals, this photograph preserves the smaller administrative unit through which immigration occurred: one desk, one applicant and a line behind him.