One foggy morning in August, photographer Ilka Hartmann traveled from her home in Bolinas to Pier 33, the gateway to Alcatraz. Among the first to board the ferry, she secured a spot at the vessel’s bow. Braced against the railing, Ms. Hartmann leaned into the spray, her gaze fixed upwind as a craggy outcropping materialized through the miasma: the notorious penitentiary, lying like a black island in a white sea.
While tourists murmured about…