Checking In to a New Life in America

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“The rooms and the corridors are all the same,” said the photographer Gabriele Stabile, “but the stories that inhabit these rooms are all different.”

He was describing a quintessentially American environment: the airport hotel, whose air-conditioned, nondescript rooms come with a bed, a television and a sparkling bathroom. But to the people Mr. Stabile met in those rooms and corridors, it was an unknown world.

Mr. Stabile spent years documenting refugees’ first nights in the United States. His photos were published by Voice of Witness in “Refugee Hotel,” a book written with Juliet Linderman that also shows how resettled refugees adapt to life in communities across America.

The images are in an exhibition through late December at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York. Danielle Jackson, the project director there, said she was drawn to the “mood and beauty” of the images.

Gabriele Stabile/Cesuralab A young Cuban refugee, asleep in Miami. Nov. 15, 2007.

The first photo that struck her shows a man standing by a window, bathed in red light. “There’s a sort of humanity in that image that I really appreciate,” Ms. Jackson said. “You feel and understand a sense of contemplation, a sense of tiredness â€" a sense of respite, almost.”

Ms. Jackson worked with Mr. Stabile to choose images, organizing them around the journey of the refugees. The exhibit, she added, is both an opportunity for refugees living in the Bronx â€" home to immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America â€" to explore their pasts and for visitors to try to comprehend the refugee experience.

Some of the photos were taken from the point of view of the people Mr. Stabile photographed.

“What does it mean to see the world from a completely new vantage point?” Ms. Jackson said. “What does it mean to look at our culture from the outside and to think about what it means to other people?”

Mr. Stabile hopes that the work conveys the experience of seeing the world anew â€" one he equates to becoming a child again.

“Kids relate to all that is new with great enthusiasm,” he said. “Parents, they’re sometimes taken aback or scared. But kids are much more playful, you know â€" even if they’re tired, even if they’re scared, they always try to make it work.”

In a way, the project becomes a metaphor for photography’s revelatory quality. A good photograph, he said, opens eyes in new ways.

Mr. Stabile, 39, who works with the collective Cesuralab, is from Italy, where his father was a newspaperman. Leaving a career in the music business, the younger Mr. Stabile put aside his guitar and moved to New York to study at the International Center of Photography. While looking for an idea for his student project, he came across an article in The New York Times about the Westway Motel in Elmhurst, Queens â€" “the initial stop in a new life for that most desperate category of immigrant: the refugee fleeing war or persecution.”

It wasn’t easy to get inside. He was kicked out on his first visit. He tried again for a week, finally deciding to stay the night as a customer. Once again, he was asked to leave.

Taking a different approach, he agreed to let the International Organization for Migration use some of his photos in exchange for access. While the images were deemed “too depressing,” the group allowed him to continue his work documenting families and individuals running from a past to a future they knew nothing about.

Gabriele Stabile/Cesuralab A niece of Pastor Noel Sunzu, a Burundian refugee and religious leader, embraced her brother. Mobile, Ala. Aug. 19, 2011.

Mr. Stabile photographed arrivals at the five major ports of entry in the United States that receive refugees, in New York as well as in Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. For him, it was often a mind-boggling experience.

“The ones that make it here have been through a lot,” he said. “Sometimes they spent seven years in a refugee camp waiting to talk to me in that room in Miami.”

Mr. Stabile watched one night as a family tried to sleep on top of a bed frame, using the mattress as a cover. Another group decided to spend the night in the hallway, fearing they would be left behind if they stayed in their room.

On the cover of the book, a Burmese family investigates their bathroom for the first time. Mr. Stabile is drawn to the wonder in their eyes. That, he said, “mixed with nostalgia and fear and uncertainty, somehow resonated with me.”

In a way, the first-night photos felt to him like classic dramas â€" confined to one room, shot over the course of one night. They leave the viewer not with a feeling of closure, but one of curiosity. What happens next?

Mr. Stabile decided to revisit one of the families he met early on. He traveled to Minneapolis, where they had resettled. When he returned to New York, “life happened; months passed,” he said. He didn’t follow up.

Later, Samira, a young woman in the family, wrote to Mr. Stabile in anger. He had forgotten about them.

“That sort of killed me,” he said, “because that’s probably one of refugees’ main fears, to be left behind.”

When Mr. Stabile partnered with Ms. Linderman, she persuaded him to shoot the resettlement process, photographing his subjects adapting to new lives everywhere from Fargo, N.D. to Tulsa, Okla. They found Samira again in Minneapolis. While she agreed to meet with the journalists, she did not want to be interviewed â€" like many others, she did not want to revive painful memories.

The book is not a narrative in the sense that it follows the same people from the airport through their resettlement in smaller towns. It is two separate bodies of work that stand alongside one another, sometimes overlapping.

For Mr. Stabile, those nights spent in hotel corridors and days spent tracking people down in small communities across the country were, on the whole, not uplifting.

“It’s paradoxical, because obviously the life conditions are going to be better,” he said. “Resettlement in a different country, even considering all of the hardships and the difficulties, it’s light-years away from what life in a refugee camp is â€" or what life in a war zone is. So you get to be safe, but to translate that â€" it’s not like they get to Elysium, you know? They have another set of problems to face.”

Gabriele Stabile/Cesuralab A Burmese mother of three helped her youngest dry after a bath, at the end of a long trip from a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Myanmar to Chicago. June 4, 2010.

“Refugee Hotel” was originally scheduled to run through Dec. 1 at the Bronx Documentary Center. The show has since been extended through late December.

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