If you have visited the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, you’ve seen Phil’s sculptures.

His installation, Ellis Island Immigrants, includes eight large bronzes near the Wall of Remembrance and 33 smaller pieces on Ellis Island. The figures were cast from metal recovered from Lady Liberty, when her internal structure was replaced in the early 1980s.

”What I did was put my dreams and memories into tangible form,” Phil told the New York Times. ”They were meant to be the trapped ghosts of our ancestors, who are not that far away from us.”

In addition, the National Park Service commissioned Phil to create sculptures of Liberty’s five founders. Gustave Eiffel, who designed the superstructure, is depicted with a model of the Paris tower that bears his name. Sculptor Frederick Auguste Bartholdi holds a miniature cast of Liberty, and Joseph Pulitzer, who raised money to build Liberty’s base, is reading a newspaper. Edward Rene de la Boulaye, who gave Bartholdi the idea, and Emma Lazarus, who penned the inscription on Liberty’s base, are similarly represented.

Phil was in Madison to celebrate his 80th birthday, and he agreed to pose for a portrait. Just as he depicted Bartholdi with a miniature Liberty, I took the opportunity to photograph Phil with an Ellis Island replica Woman Traveling Alone.

This is the second time I’ve photographed a grandfather with a really interesting backstory. I recently created a portrait of Gordy the pondering physicist, who famously won a bet with Stephen Hawking.