History’s Imprint on the Land: Mark Ruwedel and Westward the Course of Empire

Last month, organizations throughout the West celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the first transcontinental railroad in North America. The California Historical Society commemorates this historic event with an exhibition featuring a contemporary photographic study of railroad landscapes by artist Mark Ruwedel (b. 1954). His series Westward the Course of Empire (1998–2004) documents hundreds of abandoned or never-completed lines throughout the US and Canadian West. Rather than chronicle the achievement of laying tracks across the frontier, the expansive survey asks us to consider the legacy of a technology that once promised to (and in many ways did) change the world.

Mark Ruwedel, Death Valley #16, 2001, gelatin silver print

 The triumphant joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, marked the beginning of a period of prolific railroad construction. Short lines built for specific purposes crisscrossed the West. By the mid-twentieth century, redundancy, lack of demand, financial mismanagement, consolidation, and the rise of automobiles brought about an industry-wide decline. Ruwedel’s Death Valley #16 (2001), for example, shows us the remnants of a trestle that once carried trains full of borax from mines in Ryan, California, over a moon-like landscape. The narrow-gauge Death Valley Railroad (1914–31) was a feeder for the larger Tonapah and Tidewater (1907–41); both railroads closed when mining operations moved closer to better deposits, making them unprofitable.

For the series, Ruwedel used a large-format view camera and printed in gelatin silver—analog equipment and materials similar to those of the first railroad photographers. Westward the Course of Empire even takes its name from nineteenth-century images—specifically, a widely reproduced lithograph published by Currier & Ives and photographs by Alexander Gardner—that visualized US territorial expansion as iron horses crossing the frontier. Their purpose was to celebrate modern civilization’s ability to reach across the continent and its corollary conquest of hostile land and native peoples.

Mark Ruwedel, Spokane Portland and Seattle #35, 2001, gelatin silver print

Ruwedel trod much of the same physical territory, often photographing features of the Western landscape that earlier photographers made iconic, but his images suggest hubris rather than victory. In Spokane Portland and Seattle #35 (2001), a craggy mountain cut opens to a view of distant hills, and we can practically envision a locomotive chugging through the pass, but there is no train here, and the tracks are nothing more than a pile of wood on the side of the road. In Central Pacific #51 (1994), railroad ties vanish in the distance—not into the horizon but into tall grass and dirt. The road takes on the character of something archaeological, an ancient path of a culture that no longer exists.

Mark Ruwedel, Central Pacific #51, 1994, gelatin silver print

In a recent talk at the California Historical Society, Ruwedel described the “land as a stage for human activity,”1 a notion that echoes ideas introduced in the 1970s by the New Topographics photographers, including Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their work marked a decisive shift away from heroic views of pristine nature (or exaltations of technological achievement) in favor of human-altered landscapes that they presented with a distinct lack of artifice and near-scientific objectivity.

Mark Ruwedel, photographs from Westward the Course of Empire on view at the California Historical Society, 2019

Ruwedel made the views for Westward the Course of Empire with a similar precision and formal rigor, using what he describes as “consistent camera syntax.” He photographed each site from a similar perspective and isolated it from its context or the full length of its original road. He then compiled the photographs into an inventory organized by type: cuts, grades, tunnels, water towers. (Only his pictures of trestles—best seen from distances or angles—deviate from his usual vantage point.) He presents the series in grids that suggest rationality while pointing to the scale and disorderliness of the railroad-building enterprise.

As though cataloging unique specimens, Ruwedel carefully handwrote the name of the rail line in pencil below each photograph. These names, he says, were aspirational in that many of the lines never reached their intended destinations. Tonapah and Tidewater, for example, did not meet the ocean. Nevertheless, he notes that “the caption implicates the picture in a historical drama.” These are not empty landscapes to be filled with human ambitions but evidence of what happened, the imprint of history on the land.

In many ways Ruwedel’s photographs are neutral documents that simply bear witness to the contest between nature and technology. Yet by showing us sites we would typically overlook and treating them like monuments elegantly rendered in gelatin silver, Ruwedel makes his point. The impact of our collective social and economic goals on the land deserves our attention.

Watch footage from our April 24th artists talk with Mark Ruwedel below:

Note

1. This and all subsequent Mark Ruwedel quotations are taken from his April 24, 2019, talk at the California Historical Society.

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Written by Erin Garcia, Managing Curator of Exhibitions

Photographing Disaster: Depicting the Aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake

This blog post originally appeared in California History Journal, Vol. 96 No. 1, Spring 2019

An earthquake is a visual event. Photographs taken in San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake reveal an almost unrecognizable image of the young city, showing piles of rubble and coils of melted iron swirling serpent-like from the hollow frames of collapsed buildings. One such image shows the charred remains of the Dana Building—the first Art Nouveau building in San Francisco—juxtaposed against the steel skeleton of the unfinished Union League Building. The façade of the Dana Building stands like a ghostly shell, its shattered windows and collapsed walls producing the effect of a building turned inside-out. The building’s sleek white surface is dappled not with light but with ash, a vestigial trace of the flames that had licked its walls and left the building in ruins. The building looks like it was destroyed in a flash.

Stockton Street between Geary and Post Streets. San Francisco Subjects, Photography Collection, PC-SF-EQ (1906), California Historical Society 

What would it be like to wake up and find your city unrecognizable? To find unstable ground not only beneath your feet, but in front of your eyes? The philosopher William James described how in the aftermath of the earthquake, his students at Stanford University slept outdoors in order to “get the full unusualness out of the experience.”1 The photographer Arnold Genthe remarked that the streets “presented a weird appearance . . . many ludicrous sights met the eye: an old lady carrying a large bird cage with four kittens inside . . . a man tenderly holding a pot of calla lilies, muttering to himself; a scrub woman, in one hand a new broom and in the other a large black hat with ostrich plumes; a man in an old-fashioned nightshirt and swallow tails, being startled when a friendly policeman spoke to him, ‘Say, Mister, I guess you better put on some pants.’ ”2

But these “unusual” and “ludicrous” sights were not the visuals that San Francisco’s civic leaders sought to promote. Intent on rebuilding the city as quickly as possible, pol- iticians, boosters, and industrial magnates propagated an image of San Francisco as re- silient and organized—a phoenix worthy of modern development and international investment. Compare the photograph of the Dana Building to an image better aligned with this booster rhetoric, taken by the photographer George Lawrence. Entitled “San Francisco in Ruins,” it is an aerial view of the aftermath, taken from a kite suspended 2,000 feet above the city. Lawrence’s panorama is perhaps most impressive in its ability to show the fire’s devastation not as ruinous, but as a contained event. Buildings may be smoldering, but the city’s roads and ports—symbols of industrial potential—remain. In the upper righthand corner, the clouds part to reveal the sun shining brightly on the city below, symbolizing its ordained rebirth.

By contrast, the photograph of the Dana Building depicts the aftermath as a period of precariousness and uncertainty. If the intact frame of the Union League Building conveys the city’s industrial ambition, the crumbling remains of the Dana—with its Art Nouveau walls standing jagged like loose teeth, ready to fall at any moment—read as a humbling reminder of the city’s fragility. The piles of rubble, brush, and planks lining the street symbolically dis- mantle the city before our eyes. Even the man riding through on his cart evokes a sense of contingency, his blurred face reminding the viewer that this photograph, and the landscape that it depicts, could look completely different if it had been taken in any other moment. The photograph compels the viewer to conceptualize the earthquake not as a propelling and productive force of modernization, but as a harbinger of uncertainty and radical possibility.

San Francisco in Ruins from Lawrence Captive Airship, 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay. PC-PANO_001
California Historical Society

Reflecting on the 1906 earthquake on its centennial, the writer Rebecca Solnit suggests that images of ruins and decay help us to remember that history is not teleological, but rather an ebb and flow of progress and decline. She writes: “[Decay] is the negative image of history and a necessary aspect of it. To erase decay or consciousness of decay, decline, entropy, and ruin is to erase the understanding of the unfolding relation between all things, of darkness to light, of age to youth, of fall to rise.”³ Read alongside this photograph of the ruins of the Dana Building, Solnit’s description allows us to see the structure as its own “negative image of his- tory,” its exterior melding visually with the interior to form a negative image of a building designed to symbolize modern progress and aesthetics.

In this way, the photograph also evokes a different sort of negative: a 35-millimeter film neg- ative, a technology that would be patented in America just two years later. Notice how the empty window frames are stacked neatly in rows resembling a film strip, as if to suggest the myriad ways in which the disaster could have been pictured and remembered. This photo- graph was likely taken by an amateur photographer, newly able to photograph their city after the first affordable snapshot camera was introduced by the Eastman Kodak Company just six years prior. It is through such amateur photographs that we are able to see a different view of the earthquake’s aftermath, one taken not from the point of view of a booster but from that of a citizen processing the realities of the disaster. Looking through the window frames—depicted within the frame of this forgotten photograph—we can crane our necks to imagine what it would have been like to experience the disaster as a citizen, the visual landscape of the city changing before our eyes.

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Written by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator at California Historical Society

Railroads Public Programs Preview: 5 Not-to-Miss Exhibition Related Events at CHS

With each new exhibition comes a flurry of public programs designed to help guests dive deeply into the core concepts within them.  Each exhibition provides new opportunities for conversation and interaction between our audiences and our organization, the exhibitions, and each other.  In order to better understand the final programmatic product let’s go back a bit and share how we design our exhibition-related public programs.

Around six to eight months before an exhibition opens, departments from across CHS sit down and discuss the exhibition and its core concepts. The curator(s) will present on the conceptual framework, key themes, and topics. Staff have the opportunity to pose questions as well as provide suggestions and insights. The Public Program Manager (me) then begins drafting program ideas to present to curators in a follow-up meeting. During that follow-up meeting, drafted ideas begin to harden and afterward I am able to begin reaching out to speakers and partners, further developing those ideas based on what the speakers’ expertise is and how they envision their place within the event. The collaborations between partners, speakers, and CHS staff are integral to the vibrant final product.

On March 21st, we opened two complimentary exhibitions, Mark Ruwedel: Westward the Course of Empire and Overland to California: Commemorating the Transcontinental Railroad. Below is a brief rundown of some of our upcoming exhibition-related programs. We hope that you mark them on your calendar, as they are not to be missed!

Thursday, April 4^th, 6:00PM

Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the California Railroad

Professor of American Studies at Barnard University, Manu Karuka, will present on his new book Empire’s Tracks while focusing on indigenous experiences in relation to the transcontinental railroad. He and Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, Joanne Barker (Lenape), will be in conversation about indigenous history and counter sovereignty. A book signing will close the event. Learn more.

Thursday, April 18, 6:00PM

Chinese and Chinese American Genealogies and the California Railroads

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Wednesday, July 24, 6:00PM

Labor Strikes and Fights and the Transcontinental Railroad

In 1969, during the 100th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese American communities and descendants of railroad workers felt a disconnect and articulated that there was a lack of focus on their ancestors’ history and contributions. This year, during the railroad’s 150^th anniversary, organizations and individuals from across California will be highlighting the important contributions of Chinese and Chinese Americans to the building and maintenance of the railroads.

CHS will be hosting several events to honor this important history, the first being on April 18th with presentations by Al Cheng, Grant Din, Sue Lee, and Paulette Liang. They will focus on how and why Chinese and Chinese Americans are seeking to find their connection to this work, examples of individuals who have found genealogical connections, as well as those who have sought out but did not find a connection. Learn more.

The second event will be held July 24th and focuses on key labor battles which involved Chinese railroad workers, including the historic eight-day strike in 1867. Gordon Chang and Lawrence Shoup will present on this event and other important labor battles in celebration of Laborfest, which occurs each July.

Wednesday, May 15^th, 6:00PM

Exploring the Gilded Age in California and its Reverberations Today

On May 15th we will explore the Gilded Age in California and its relationship to the Big Four, labor, and the railroads. How has the Gilded Age influenced what California is today? Learn more with moderator, William Frances Deverell (USC), panelists Richard White (Stanford), Margarite Shaffer (Miami University), Barbara Berglund Sokolov (Presidio Historian), and Jack Kelly (historian and author of Edge of Anarchy). Learn more. 

Thursday, June 27^th, 6:00PM

Women and Their Role on the Rails

On June 27^th, we explore the role women played (or did not play) in the railroads. How did imagery of wealthy white women tell a particular story about the railroad? How were women of color and people of color generally excluded from the transportation system? Professor Amy Richter of Clark University and Julia H. Lee of U.C. Irvine will present on these questions and be available to discuss other related topics after their presentations. Learn more.

As we move deeper into the summer we will add additional programs, so continue to follow our Society Happenings e-newsletter and check out our online calendar at my.californiahistoricalsociety.org for more information.

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Written by Patty Pforte, Programs & Visitor Experience Manager at CHS. 

Reading Pictures

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eaves-drop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

—Walker Evans, ca. 1960

Looking is hard work. For many of us, sight is the most obvious tool we use to experience our world; it feels easy, automatic, almost like breathing. But to look—to take time, to probe, to take seriously the ways in which images shape our worldview—is a different matter.

As children, we are taught to read words when we are only a few years old. And yet, modern technologies make it so that we are increasingly inundated by pictures more than text, be it on our screens, in print media, as family photographs, or as advertisements. Moving through the world, it is tempting to merely glance at the pictures we encounter, letting them coalesce into a sort of landscape or wave that washes over us and passes us by. But pictures are made by people, and so often convey the ideals, biases, and political views of their makers. However subconsciously, the images that we see every day combine to shape our own biases and political views. “What you see often becomes a part of your memory,” explains Ana-Christina Ramón, the assistant director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “and thus a part of your life experience.”

When we look closely and think about what we see, it allows us to be less immediately manipulated by the visual rhetoric of the media that we consume. But as with any good book, reading images closely can bring us an immense sense of pleasure and empathy. Imagine standing in front of your favorite painting, and taking the time to think about what emotions or forms its brush strokes evoke. Try to imagine what the artist was thinking and feeling when she put the brush to canvas, and where she was standing; think about what the painting conveys about the era or place in which it was made. With these thoughts, we do not lose sight of the work’s initial beauty. Rather, we can take in this beauty, or pain, or anger and confusion, while also asking ourselves what it is that allows the art to make us feel so strongly. We can come to the work with a sense of humility, but also thoughtfully.

I’m going to walk you through some questions I ask myself when I first look at a photograph, painting, or illustration, in the hopes that you will continue to look closely at the pictures that you encounter—be it in the museum, or on your phone’s screen. For example: 

[Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33]; by Anton Wagner, CHS, PC 017

First, take a minute or two to really look closely at every part of the photograph. What do you see? I find it helpful to speak out loud, or at least to organize my thoughts into coherent sentences so that I don’t miss anything; language helps me to process what I’m seeing. No observation is too small or too obvious. In this photograph, I see four little girls standing on a dirt road. The girls stand in front of two buildings, one built in a midcentury American ranch style, and the other built in an Asian architectural style and surrounded by a fence with an elaborate entryway. On the left hand side of the image, I see a large white water tower on big metal stilts. On the right, a tree leans into the frame. The trees, combined with the fluttering of the girls’ hair and coats, suggest that it was windy out that day. There are statues in the garden behind the fence, and telephone poles in the distance. In fact, one telephone pole leads my eye to another building that I didn’t initially see.

What is the image made of? This work is obviously a photograph; knowing what I know about photography, I know that it is a black and white gelatin silver print. This information can help me to determine when the image was made: gelatin silver prints were most commonly made between 1900-2000, which is a fairly broad range, though we have other context clues to help us determine the date, such as clothing and architecture styles. If I can hold the image, I like to think about who else might have held it, and why, and how it might have circulated or travelled. This photograph could have been a family photograph, or a journalist’s image, or a photograph made by a documentarian. Maybe it was stored in an album, or printed in the newspaper.

If I’m looking at a photograph, I ask myself where the photographer was standing when they took the picture, and why. In this case, the answer is not particularly complicated: the photographer is standing in the road, and photographs the children from an angle. But this simple observation can actually tell something about the photographer’s intentions. Why didn’t they take the photograph head on, and from a closer vantage? What does the angle afford us that a more direct composition would lose? And what do we lose from this perspective?

However simple, the last question can tell me so much about this picture and the person who made it. I can guess that because the photograph is not a close up view of these children’s faces, it was composed specifically to show them in the context of their surroundings. Rather than frame the image so that we can only see the Asian-style building, however, the photographer chose to juxtapose it against the adjacent ranch-style house and water tower, both of which suggest to me that the photograph was taken in the United States. This isn’t a close up portrait of four children; it’s a photograph of four children shown living in a diverse neighborhood, likely in the United States. Their clothing and the architecture surrounding them suggest that this photograph was made before or during World War II. They look like they are of Japanese descent, which makes me wonder if they were impacted by Executive Order 9066. I think about the immigrant experience in the United States, now and throughout this country’s history; I think about my grandfather who was detained by the United States government during World War II because he was an Italian immigrant, and how he never told his children, or spoke Italian in their presence.

You can see here how an unassuming image without any text or caption can still say so much.

I’ll show my hand, which is that we are fortunate to have some information about this photograph. The photograph is titled [Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33], and was taken by the German photographer Anton Wagner. As an art historian, I’m lucky when I have this much information to go off of: knowing the photographer allows me to probe deeper into his background and intentions, and the title can tell me so much, not least the fact that the building shown is a Buddhist temple, and that the photograph was taken ca. 1932-33 on Terminal Island—a Japanese American fishing community that, as it happens, was the first to be evacuated following Executive Order 9066. But I believe that pictures can tell us so much more than any caption can.

My last piece of advice is to try to look with a close but curious eye. Pictures do not exist solely as a record of the past, or as a container of information and data. A picture is not a question to be answered; we do not look so that we can be “right.” We look because photographs and works of art have things to tell us about what it felt like to live in an earlier time, and about how we relate to people with whom we have seemingly little in common—be it these four little girls, or a painter, or a sculptor living in Athens in 500 BCE. They allow us to admit just how much we don’t know, and to feel vulnerable when they elicit emotion. I believe that looking closely at pictures make us more human, in increasingly technological times.

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Written by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator at California Historical Society

The Legacy of Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins is something of an enigma. Very few letters written in his own hand survive, leaving historians and early photography enthusiasts to fill in the gaps of his life and career. This makes some of the concrete details of his life surprisingly hard to pin down. According to various sources, he is either the oldest of eight children or the youngest of five. He arrived in San Francisco in 1851…or was it 1849? Accounts of his life are filled with hedges (“1855-61: Photographed New Idrea and New Almaden mines and Mission Santa Clara (according to Turill)’’ says one chronology) and guesses. Information presented as fact may not actually be, which can make writing an account of his life (my task as Project Archivist at California Historical Society) somewhat difficult.

His name, when placed next to that of his contemporary, Eadweard Muybridge, recedes. Muybridge, an Englishman whose motion studies of Leland Stanford’s horse Occident and moving zoopraxiscope are often credited as the beginning of motion pictures, seems to get all of the glory. Muybridge was a more colorful character. He changed his name several times, from Edward James Muggeridge to Edward Muygridge to Eadward Muybridge, in what seems to be the slow and iterative perfecting of how he would prefer to be known – as if he at all times had one eye fixed on his own greatness. At one point, he signed his photographs “Helios” (“Titan of the Sun”). He murdered his wife’s lover but was acquitted for what, at the time, was considered “justifiable homicide.”

Interestingly, the differences between the two artist’s statures seem to be archival matter. Watkins famously lost the contents of his San Francisco photography studio during the 1906 earthquake, just before he was to transfer the archive to Stanford University. Tyler Green writes, “In fact, just a week before the earthquake, a curator from the university had visited Watkins…in preparation for the university’s apparent acquisition of Watkins’s archives, the first time an American university or museum would recognize a photographer’s importance in such a way.” An amazing photograph exists showing Watkins as a bearded elderly man with a cane, suit, and top hat on the streets of San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, a massive cloud of smoke visible in the background.

River View, Cathedral Rock, Yosemite [CEW 31], 1861; Carleton E. Watkins photograph collection, PC-RM-Watkins; Box 1, Folder 5; California Historical Society

  Much of Watkins’ studio was lost, including the massive mammoth glass plates used to create his famous photographs of the Yosemite Valley and other parts of the West as it was being settled. Complicating the issue is the fact that, due to poor financial decisions earlier in his career, Watkins had lost many of his original negatives to a group of creditors which required him to reshoot many of his original photographs (his “New Series” is the result of this). Watkins’ photographs are dispersed widely and held by numerous archives and private collectors around the country. Chief among these are the Bancroft Library, the Society of California Pioneers, and the California Historical Society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Muybridge did manage to eventually transfer his archive to Stanford. In fact, Leland Stanford – a railroad baron – was Muybridge’s greatest champion and supporter, much as Collis Huntington was Watkins’. Some have suggested that this matter of the photographers’ archives is the reason that Muybridge is better known today.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, also compares the two men. she writes, “In the 1860s and 1870s, landscape was a western business, but Watkins came first, and he stood alone.” Over the years, his subjects varied from mining camps to railroads and Spanish missions up and down the California coast. Watkins photographed famous artists, writers, and professors, native plants of California and the Southwest, and the newly built Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City – a great dome that looks like it recently descended from space.

Watkins’s gorgeous nature photographs still stun viewers and his style is almost instantly recognizable from his beautifully composed photographs with a certain discernable focus and clarity. This is even more amazing given the incredibly labor intensive process that created them and involved a team of mules, giant glass plates, and a travelling “dark room” in a covered wagon. Still, Solnit writes: “They are radiant with a mysterious serenity.”

Nevada Fall, Yosemite [CEW 90], 1861; Carleton E. Watkins photograph collection, PC-RM-Watkins; Box 3, Folder 6; California Historical Society.  

The California Historical Society is making the entirety of its Watkins collection available for the first time, and its contents are revealed in a detailed finding aid. More selections will also soon be available on the CHS digital library. This work was made possible by Teaching California – a statewide initiative developed to bring primary sources into California’s classrooms. There are also a number of Watkins photographs (including a panorama of San Francisco) currently on view in our galleries as a part of the Boomtowns exhibition.

Bibliography:

Green, Tyler. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.

Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking, 2003.

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Written by Erin Hurley, Teaching California Project Archivist at California Historical Society

Launching Boomtowns with our San Francisco Community

On October 11, the California Historical Society celebrated the opening of its newest exhibition, Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco, with CHS members, VIP guests, and staff!

The exhibition, curated by CHS’s Erin Garcia, considers the first one hundred years of photography in what would become California’s two most prominent cities. As San Francisco and Los Angeles entered a period of rapid, unimaginable growth following the state’s entry into the Union in 1850, photography played a significant role in defining and shaping how the rest of the country understood California. Photographers also captured and responded to the distinctly different topography and development patterns of the two cities. The exhibition features work by both anonymous photographers and well-known artists—such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Minor White, Laura Adams Armer, and Arnold Genthe—and includes photographs made for a broad range of purposes, from civic boosterism and real estate development, to industry and art. From pictures of San Francisco on fire following the 1906 earthquake, to photographs taken in the 1920s of the nascent Hollywoodland housing development—which bequeathed the city its iconic sign—Boomtowns draws exclusively from CHS’s extensive photographic holdings.

The Thursday night opening including remarks by the curator, Erin Garcia, and CHS’s Executive Director, Dr. Anthea Hartig. Food was provided by CHEFS (Conquering Homelessness through Employment in Food Services), a 5-month culinary training program that provides instruction in technical and professional skills enhancement necessary for entry into the food service industry, with refreshments from Fort Point. Guests also enjoyed a jazz trio from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music!

Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco remains on view at CHS’s headquarters at 678 Mission St. in San Francisco until March 10, 2019. Please visit californiahistoricalsociety.org or call us at 415 357-1848 for more information.

Want to hang out with us at hip, fun, history events like this one? Join today!

                 

Images courtesy of Shannon Foreman photography

Looking at Hollywoodland and How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco

Here at the California Historical Society, we’ve been busy installing the upcoming exhibition Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco. Drawn from CHS’s extensive photography holdings, the show looks back at the first one hundred years of photography in San Francisco and Los Angeles to consider how the medium shaped both our impressions of these cities and the bricks and mortar of the cities themselves.

The new medium of photography arrived in California just in time to witness the state’s dramatic, and often violent and inequitable, transformation at the hands of Americans. But photographs do not simply bear witness to events unfolding before the camera: they also interpret these events and imbue them with meaning. Sometimes subtle compositional choices can convey complex attitudes and ideas. Consider, for example, this photograph of the original “Hollywoodland” sign, taken by an unknown photographer in Los Angeles circa 1924–29 (fig. 1). At first glance, it seems straightforward—an objective record of what Hollywood looked like before it was fully developed, and before the “land” was dropped from its name. But it has so much more to say.

Photographer unknown, Hollywoodland, c. 1924-29. Gelatin silver print. California Historical Society.

Let’s look closely at the composition. To make this image, the photographer was likely standing on a dirt bluff adjacent to a newly built road. This might seem like an innocuous detail, but it prompts the question: Why didn’t they shoot from a closer vantage? Why show the sign so far in the distance, with the vast valley sprawling out before them? We may never know for sure, but the viewpoint conveys a burgeoning city rife with potential for developers, industrialists, and new residents. In the foreground, the out-of-focus shrubs and undeveloped land suggest that the region is wild and uninhabited, and thus ready to be built up. At the same time, the newly built roads weaving through the frame, and the small number of impressive houses being constructed throughout, convey that the city is not without infrastructure. Come to Hollywoodland, the image seems to say, and be a part of the exciting changes already taking place.

In the 1920s, a syndicate of developers, including Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, planned a subdivision in the hills above Beachwood Canyon near Griffith Park. Anticipating that the Mulholland Highway, then under construction, would eventually connect to the site, the group erected what was meant to be a temporary fifty-foot-high sign across the top of Mount Lee advertising the development. It would become, after the last four letters were removed in 1949, one of the most iconic landmarks in the world. Laborers with steam shovels graded roads connecting the neighborhood’s streets with Mulholland Drive. Photographs much like this one appeared in real estate brochures, suggesting that this picture may have been taken to appeal to developers or to sell homes.

In photography, what is not pictured can often be as revealing as what is. The perception of Los Angeles as an empty canvas required obfuscating any signs of an indigenous history, despite the fact that the region had been occupied by humans for more than ten thousand years. This myth of Los Angeles as an empty canvas is propagated by our Hollywoodland image, which suggests that these newly built houses—and the bright white sign watching over them—are the first-ever human marks on the chaparral-covered land. Similarly, the storybook homes dotting the wooded canyons, designed in the Spanish, French, and English styles, imply that Los Angeles emerged as if from a fairy tale. All of this smooths over the turbulent and often violent events underlying the region’s development, which involved unchecked violence by Anglos against Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chinese.

Belying the grotesque social realities of the day, this image would have come across as nostalgic, evoking the pastoral rusticity of an imagined Spanish past. But look closely and you can see how it, like so many other photographs in Boomtowns, reveals that nothing about the construction of California’s cities was inevitable. They were built and rebuilt by labor, force of will, profit imperatives, and the frame of the camera. We encourage you to visit this exciting exhibition in person, and see what a crucial role the camera played in building our state.

Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco runs October 12 and March 10, 2018.  

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by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator, and Erin Garcia, Managing Curator of Exhibitions

CHS Digitizes Anton Wagner’s Undiscovered Historic Photograph Collection

West Los Angeles Farmland, February 2, 1933

[Farm on Robertson Boulevard North of Hall Road Studio Farm]

Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17,

California Historical Society

When my father donated the pictures it was with the wish that they could be accessible to as many people as possible, and now they can.

—Geoff Wagner, 2016

Today the California Historical Society celebrates Digital Archives Day—established by the California State Archives—with the launch of our digital pilot platform featuring the photographic collection “Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17.” A cultural geography student from Germany writing his dissertation about metropolitan Los Angeles, Wagner’s 400-plus research photographs document the city’s transformation during the early 1930s. Illustrating the period between the booms of the 1920s and post–World War II, Wagner’s images of Depression-era Los Angeles were selected for CHS’s inaugural digitization project for their innovation and historical value.

Old Chinatown, January 22, 1933

[Chinatown; Marchesault Street, East of Alameda]

Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17,

California Historical Society

Unique to the CHS Collection and one of our most important and valuable twentieth-century collections, Wagner’s images have already generated enthusiasm among researchers, historians, and lovers of Los Angeles history:

• A selection from the Wagner collection was highlighted in August 2016 at the CHS/LA as Subject exhibition “History Keepers: Traversing Los Angeles.” 
• Wagner’s work is featured today, October 10, in KCET’s Lost LA blog: “Anton Wagner’s Walkthrough Los Angeles.”  The piece is written by CHS archivists Marie Silva and Jaime Henderson
• On October 15, CHS archivists Marie Silva and Jaime Henderson will speak about the Wagner digital collection at the LA as Subject Archives Bazaar at the University of Southern California. 
• Getty Publications will publish a new translation of Wagner's thesis in 2018.

·         Over the next two years, the California Historical Society, with partner organizations, will explore the relevance of Wagner’s work to the study of American metropolises today and his legacy as a pioneer urban chronicler.

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Read more about Anton Wagner on the CHS blog:

History Keepers: Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles, 1932–33 by Shelly Kale

Anton Wagner’s Images of Los Angeles by Jaime Henderson

Oil Wells on Court Street from Bixel by Shelly Kale

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Photographing Yosemite: Rondal Partridge's Pave It and Paint It Green

Rondal Partridge, Pave It and Paint It Green, signed gelatin silver print, c. 1965 

Gift of Rondal Partridge / California Historical Society

Beginning in his early twenties, Rondal Partridge operated the renowned photographer Ansel Adams’ darkroom in Yosemite Valley. From 1937 to 1939 he helped produce prints of Adams’ idealistic Yosemite photographs for tourists. Thirty years later—during an era of political, social, and environmental awareness and upheaval—he captured tourism’s impact on the park with his best-known photograph, Pave It and Paint It Green. Today it is a reminder of the fragility of our National Parks and the imperative that we always preserve them. 

As a tribute to Rondal Partridge, we offer an essay by Shelly Kale—published in the California History journal by the University of California Press in association with CHS—about a man and the image that captured not only his spirit but that of a generation.

Pave It and Paint It Green

I don’t have any preconception of what is valuable as a photographic subject. A view, a snake—I never know what will catch my eye. I shoot it, print it, and wait for fashion to catch up with my eyes.

—Rondal Partridge, 2002 (1)

When Rondal Partridge (1917—2015) took this photograph of a congested parking lot in Yosemite National Park, it was the impact of tourism that caught his eye. “I went to Yosemite with a producer from KQED to make a film,” Partridge recalled in 2002. “All he saw was falling water, tall cliffs, and happy people…I saw congestion, destruction, erosion.” (2)

Partridge was the son of the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883—1976) and in his younger years assisted the celebrated photographers Dorothea Lange (1895—1965) and Ansel Adams (1902—1984). As photographs curator Jennifer A. Watts noted, in the 1960s and 1970s Partridge was one of “a new generation of up-and-coming photographers” who were “redefining photography’s function in Yosemite…This new school of photographers discovered and depicted a Yosemite unimagined by Adams. They framed their shots on the valley floor rather than the craggy vistas favored by Adams.” (3)

Unlike Adams’s emphasis on Yosemite’s purity, Partridge saw the interrelationship between the park’s human imprint and its natural beauty. In his photograph, the sprawl of cars across the foreground and the majestic Half Dome framed by trees seem to have equal billing. Partridge, art historian Sally Stein observed, “resisted compartmentalizing nature as a thing revered for its very apartness. Rather, in his view, we are part of nature and, for better and worse, it is yoked to us.” (4)

As “photography’s ‘grand laboratory,’” Yosemite has inspired photographers since Charles Leadner Weed (1824—1903) entered Yosemite Valley in 1855. The 1861 images of Carleton E. Watkins (1829—1916) had far reaching effects: they provided the visual evidence for Yosemite’s preservation that led to passage of the 1864 Yosemite Grant Act. That piece of legislation set aside the Yosemite Balley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias for protection by the State of California “inalienable for all time,” paving the way for our national park system. (5)

Following Watkins’s lead, generations of landscape and tourist photographers alike focused their lenses on Yosemite’s geological wonders and inspirational splendor. But like the painter Chuira Obata (1885—1975), whose artworks of Yosemite in the late 1920s brought a fresh perspective to the park’s visual record, Partridge broke with this traditional approach. And like Eadweard Muybridge (1830—1904), whose daring feats over the landscape to reach the best viewpoints produced astonishing photographs of Yosemite, Partridge was intrepid. At the Camp Curry parking lot, “I got up on the top of the car and took the shot and was blasted by a bullhorn from a ranger. He demanded I get off the car. He wanted to arrest me, and I said I refused to be arrested. I convinced his supervisor that I had obtained permission to photograph, and that I could shoot from wherever I wanted.” (6)

By the mid-1960s, when Partridge trained his camera on Half Dome, the automobile’s destructiveness was apparent. As National Park Service historian David Louter recounted, one critic observed that the automobile “had brought more downgrading changes to Yosemite Valley than the previous five thousand years of erosion. Each day it was cramming a medium-sized city into a valley meant for a hamlet.” (7)

As the decade ended, the motto “Parks Are for People” was a rallying cry to address the problem. In 1980, automobiles were recognized in the National Park Service’s General Management Plan as “the single greatest threat to enjoyment of the natural and scenic qualities of Yosemite.” (8) Each year, the plan noted, approximately thirty miles of roadway accommodated a million trucks, cars, and buses. Decades later Partridge would state, “Automobiles are a main concern of mine. They’ll cover the world ten feet deep in the next fifty years. I have dozens of photographs of parking lots.” (9)

Today—as we mark the hundredth anniversary of the National Park Service and evaluate the success of its conflicting mandates, use and preservation—automobiles are still at home in the Camp Curry parking lot. (10) As Yosemite photographer Howard Weamer described, “The lot is slightly more organized now, with parking in rows perpendicular to the camera, and always full.” (11).

Would Partridge have found the accommodation worthy of his camera’s eye?

NOTES

1. Elizabeth Partridge and Sally Stein, Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge (San Francisco: California Historical Society Press, 2003), 134.
2. Ibid., 136.
3. Jennifer A. Watts, “Photography’s Workshop: Yosemite in the Modern Era,” in Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, ed. Amy Scott (Berkeley: University of California Press in Association with the Autry National Center, 2006), 129–130.
4. Sally Stein, “‘Everything but the Grand Gesture’: Tradition and Irreverence in the Photography of Rondal Partridge,” in Partridge and Stein, Quizzical Eye, 24–25.
5. Watts, “Photography’s Workshop,” 115; Thirty‐Eighth Congress of the United States of America, An Act Authorizing a Grant to the State of California of the “Yo‐Semite Valley,” and of the Land Embracing the “Mariposa Big Tree Grove,” June 30, 1864, http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/library/Yosemite_Park_June_30_1864.pdf.
6. Partridge and Stein, Quizzical Eye, 136.
7. David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 21.
8. U.S. Department of the Interior, Yosemite National Park: General Management Plan, Visitor Use/Park Operations/Development (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 3.
9. Bob O’Brien, “A Vision Sustained,” National Parks 76, no. 5–6 (July/August 2002), 44; David T. Page, Yosemite and the Southern Sierra Nevada: An Explorer’s Guide (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press), 67; Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 176; Partridge and Stein, Quizzical Eye, 137.
10. With the 1916 Organic Act, Congress authorized the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” See “Robin Winks on the Evolution and Meaning of the Organic Act,” The George Wright Forum 24, no. 3 (2007), http://www.georgewright.org/243winks.pdf.
11. Howard Weamer, e-mail message to the author, October 16, 2015.

Shelly Kale is Publications and Strategic Projects Manager at the California Historical Society. Formerly Managing Editor of California History, she has held editorial and administrative positions in academic, museum, educational, electronic, and trade and mass-market publishing.

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This article originally appeared in Spotlight, a feature of the California History journal (Vol. 93, #2), published by the University of California Press in association with the California Historical Society. Conceived by former journal editor and historian Janet Fireman as a last-page photographic feature that itself would evoke a lasting image for journal’s readers, Spotlight draws from CHS’s vast and diverse collection of California photography and photographic history.
California History, Vol. 93, Number 2, pp. 64–66, ISSN 0162-2897, electronic ISSN 2327-1485. ©2016 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.