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

Glimpses of Paradise

There is a church a block away from where I live. I go there to visit a tree. One of its branches has descended upon the earth, bending heavily from its weight; a forked stick helps support it and hold it up. I also go there to see a spirit mural. It is a beautiful mosaic of a white-tailed dove crowned with what I imagine is intended as a symbol of the holy spirit. Some may interpret it a phoenix rising. Its tail spreads across four columns of the church, spawning various symbols—hearts, shells, angels, and my favorite, a couple - the silhouette of a man and a woman. My idealist self places her fingers on the shadowy figures and yearns, wishing for these symbols to materialize into existence. This idealist yearning, this ideal is something like the glimpses of paradise that I see in the eyes of the believers in Peoples Temple, particularly in the photographs of the children, the dancers, and the older women who believe in the possibility of healing, of all races coming together as a unit under the banner of love.

Child with baby sloth, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 6; California Historical Society.

What is Peoples Temple? Difficult question. Difficult and perhaps impossible to answer. The more you learn about Peoples Temple, the more questions begin to multiply and answers become hazy. Working on the Peoples Temple Publication Department records, a project funded by the National Historical Records and Publications Commission (NHPRC), has provided me with some insights into this important time in history. It’s worth keeping in mind the context of the photography prints--they were designed to serve the Publications Department’s purposes including fundraising, church member activities, public relations, and community outreach.

Working on the Peoples Temple photographs and some of the textual material gives one a glimpse into the ideal that was sought from its conception. Perhaps you come upon a beautiful child taking a stroll in the jungle at Jonestown, discovering a flower and pausing for a moment to consider it and hold it with care.

Child with flower, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 6; California Historical Society.

One might come upon an image of a troupe of African American dancers in exuberant dress, striking a pose with raised fists, a symbol for Black power. Their youthful energy electrifying you and making you remember what it was like to yearn for equality, making you still yearn for it like the dream lives on.

African dancers, circa 1975-1976; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 2; California Historical Society.

Then there is the look that the woman at church gives her pastor, in whom she places her complete trust. So what if he is forged from another clan, another color? He has embraced you and accepted you and welcomed you in this space that you believe is your new home. Your history is a heavy tree branch that needs holding up a bit.

Woman at church service with Jim Jones, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 31, folder 2; California Historical Society.

Some observers like to fixate on the end, but sometimes forget to consider or question the beginning and the ensuing journey. What impetus drove this engine? We cannot dismiss the importance of symbols and the meaning they carry in our frail vessels. We yearn for community and company. The photographic prints and textual material in the newly processed Peoples Temple Publications Department records are a testament to such yearning. Whether one considers the tragic end, regarding it as a warning not to trust those who claim benevolence and promise protection then betray such a trust, or whether one suspends their disbelief and allows the yearning to take hold through the eyes and deeds of the beholder, one may catch a glimpse of paradise. A glimpse of paradise in the sense that, look—it can be all simple, we can all work together under the same roof, share the same land and space, dance to the same drum beat. Yet this simple thing eludes us continually so we are always just catching glimpses of what could be.

Two youth in Jonestown, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 4; California Historical Society.

But ... what if we were to reframe the question? What if we were to temper our idealism with a dose of realism? As I was contemplating the Peoples Temple after processing the photo prints, a play titled Tetecan: An Aztec Tragedy, from another of CHS’s collections caught my eye in the vault. I opened it to the foreword, which besides some anachronistic observations on the Aztecs, had something interesting written there:

“Each of us in his destined hour, in hope or extremity, mounts the steps of idealism. In all times and places, fervid youths have climbed in search of idealism, driven upward by sight of the seething plain of life across which the light of brotherhood appears at times to burn fitfully. Too many of them have climbed in vain.”

Sometimes the young of spirit desire to undo the imperfect system that keeps the light of brotherhood from burning with a peaceful flame. We dare give birth to hope and begin to climb the mountain of idealism, leaving the plain of life behind; almost obliterating it and starting anew with our own thoughts, on our own terms, seeking like-minded people. We want paradise on earth, now. We tire of waiting for elusive promises. This, however, can be a dangerous proposition. Humans are imperfect beings embedded with foibles and faults, often drawn to extremes. Often reacting to others’ extremes—from greed to idealism. The lessons imparted to us in the narratives of the Peoples Temple and those who seek to explain the church are often extreme, understandably mirroring such narratives. But what about the lessons imparted in the brief glimpses of the promise of paradise the eye may draw from some of the photographs? Can anything be extracted from these? Even if there’s a strong possibility that some of it was curated to fit the purpose of publication?

I think there is something important to be extracted from these brief glimpses. I think part of the lesson lies in contemplating the extremes, sure, but also, considering the journey in between, the fissures where love was let in. This is a quiet journey that involves reflection, pause, and silence.

Church members praying during service, circa 1965-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 9; California Historical Society.

Processing the Peoples Temple photo prints was something we took our time with. We sleeved some of the larger prints, housing them in new folders while keeping categories labeled by the publication department or creating new folder categories if they reflected a theme such as with the “African Dancers” folder. For some of the smaller prints such as passport photos or member photos we opted to house these in envelopes to keep them from falling from their folders…. I wanted to contain the photographs as if I could contain the spirit of the lives reflected there. I wanted to keep a level of privacy and respect to Temple members photographed even though their lives have become very public. Sometimes it’s the smallest details that show people we care.

The Peoples Temple photographs give us glimpses of a paradise the youth in us has yearned to see. But did many of them climb in vain? I like to think that the climb was not in vain. I like to do a challenging thing—to turn from the sensationalized end and pause a bit to study the faces of the people whose life held meaning and the potential for a longer, better life. The idealist in me keeps searching for these glimpses, hoping they bloom and multiply and one day materialize like during my yearning by the spirit mural. The realist in me, however, reminds herself to also temper such yearning given the nature of man and its excesses. It’s a challenging task—to both acknowledge the end, to grasp the fitful yearning of utopia so as to temper it and prevent it from happening again, but also to not forget the fissures and glimpses of paradise where life and love seeped through.

Woman with baby girl, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 4; California Historical Society.

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Written by Lynda Letona, Assistant Archivist & Reference Librarian at California Historical Society (CHS).

Photos digitized by Marissa Friedman, Imaging Technician and Cataloger at CHS.

A finding aid for the People Temple collection can be found here.

References:
Brown, Hugh. 1950. Foreword to Tetecan: An Aztec tragedy. San Francisco: Bohemian Club.

Photographic Prints, circa 1965-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; California Historical Society.

The processing of this collection was made possible by funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

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 Disappearing Photos of Peoples Temple

Among our collection of Peoples Temple Publicity Department materials is a group of ruined photographs – some faded completely to white, others thickly scattered with flaking pigment, a few recognizable but chemically streaked and melted. These photos are relics of the Temple’s practice of faith healing. It’s well known that Jim Jones’ flamboyant “healings” were at the center of Temple culture, drawing crowds to services and converting many curious visitors into serious believers. Less well understood, however, is the fact that Peoples Temple offered the service through the mail.

A few of the "disappearing photos" that sent to the Peoples Temple mailing list

This is hard to imagine in today’s connected world, but the Temple was many things to many people, depending on whether you attended services, when you joined, and whether your primary interaction was through the Peoples Temple mailing list. Without much opportunity for members to compare stories, Jones could present his organization to different people as a leftist utopian movement, a mainstream Christian church, an anti-Christian church whose pastor mocked the Scriptures and claimed to be the only God his followers needed, an ecstatic Pentecostal-style revival, or a low-key prosperity gospel ministry.

It was the latter that dominated the mailing list, which sent out a beautifully designed monthly newsletter. This mailer would usually include a donation request, and often also a small relic – a piece of Jones’ robe, a flask of holy oil, an anointed penny – which was said to give the recipient luck, or send material rewards their way. CHS’s “disappearing photos” of Jones were included with the mailer in August 1974. Believers would place the images on affected parts of their body and watch the images vanish as a sensation of healing washed over them. In reality, the photos had been intentionally developed so that they would fade on exposure to light – but the effect, to a sick and desperate person, must have held great emotional power.

The mailer itself stops just short of claiming that the photos could heal, or even of telling the recipient how to use them (in this way, the Temple avoided outright mail fraud). It does, however, include a number of testimonies which explicitly explain that when the image was touched to a sick or injured body, the image disappeared and the body was healed. The testimonies provided both verisimilitude and deniability for the Temple.

Peoples Temple monthly newsletter, August 1974

We have no way of knowing how many photos were kept as personal mementoes, how many were discarded after they appeared to work (or not work), and how many were ignored, but we do know that many of the used photos were sent back to the Temple. Some were accompanied by brief testimonial letters, others only by notes scribbled on the envelopes, and others arrived with no writing at all, just a blank and silent image.

Today, the photos convey a strange sort of emptiness. Unlike most photos, they were never important for the images they carried, but for their power as objects. Ephemeral things are always emotionally powerful; think of the autumn leaf, or cherry blossom, that makes us feel both melancholy and buoyant. In the case of the photos, their creators designed them to self-destruct in order to give them a feeling of holiness. Now, however, that emotional power is spent. These empty sheets of photographic paper have no meaning left at all.

This leaves an archivist with a question. Do we hold on to these items? If objects from the past don’t speak, do they have a place in the library? Most people assume that an archivist’s job is to hold on to everything from the past, to take care of the past so that other people don’t have to think about it. (Witness the way the word “archive” is used in email and project management software – essentially, to mean “send this to a place that I’ll never see, but don’t delete it.”) In reality, archivists let things go all the time – and usually because they don’t bear information. Why would a librarian maintain a blank book?

The question isn’t quite as simple here, of course. These photos are more comparable to a large collection of empty, mass-produced blank books, like unused diaries. They’re poignant, but in ways that we may think we understand better than we do (we don’t know why the people in my example bought diaries, or why they never used them). There’s always a danger, in reading history, of filling in your own emotional context when there is none to be had.

In the end, we discarded many of the photos. We kept a substantial number of them, both to testify to their emotional resonance with Temple members and to preserve the information that some of them had written on their backs. But when it comes to conveying the vanishing of meaning, we’ve found that twenty blank pieces of paper are as powerful as a hundred.

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Written by Isaac R. Fellman, CHS's NHPRC Project Processing Archivist

The processing of this collection was made possible by funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

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

In Your Travels: California Historical Society Collections on the Road

CHS on the Road is a series of posts by registrar Cheryl Maslin highlighting CHS collections on loan to other institutions. In your travels, we hope you will be able to visit these exhibitions.

Drawing of Achilles and accompanying Alvord Award Medal with Brooch are on view through February 17, 2019, in Artful Liaisons: Connecting Painters Grace Carpenter, Edward Espey, and Grafton Tyler Brown, Grace Hudson Museum, 431 South Main Street, Ukiah, California.

Grace Carpenter (1865–1937), with twin brother Grant, was born to Helen McCowen, a writer, civic leader, and early educator in Potter Valley, Mendocino County, California. McCowen and her husband, Aurelius Ormando Carpenter, known for his photographs of the early Mendocino railroad, lumber, and shipping industries, operated a portrait photography studio in nearby Ukiah. After showing promise as a child for her drawing skills, Grace began attending the San Francisco School of Design at age fourteen. When she returned home for summer break after her first year, instructor Oscar Kunath (1830–1909, American, b. Germany) wrote her mother, imploring, “I take the liberty as well as pleasure in stating, that she has been one of my best pupils. . . . If she intends choosing Art for her occupation, it is indeed necessary to devote all her time & talent to this high aim in life. . . . Your daughter . . . will soon rise above her classmates by studying very earnestly.”

Portrait of Grace Carpenter. See Footnote 4: Portrait of Grace Carpenter, ca. 1882, is courtesy of the Grace Hudson Museum, City of Ukiah; Acc. # 18361d. 

During her second year at art school, Carpenter won an annual student contest for best classical drawing. The subject for all entrants was a plaster cast of Ares Borghese (ca. 1–2 CE), a Roman marble sculpture in the collection of the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge, England, considered very difficult to portray in two dimensions. The prize was a medallion named after William Alvord, mayor of San Francisco from 1871 to 1873, and engraved with the contest winner’s name. Carpenter’s medallion was at some point affixed to a brooch with a cat’s-eye shell as a centerpiece, flanked with a leaf motif and a turquoise bead at either end of the pin bar. The drawing and medallion remained in her possession, later passing to her nephew, Mark Carpenter, who, with his wife, gave them to CHS in 1963. They have returned to the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah for this exhibition.

The photograph of Achilles is believed to have been taken prior to the drawing and Alvord Award being given to CHS, with the photographer unknown. The image was used in Searles R. Boynton’s book, The Painter Lady: Grace Carpenter Hudson. Eureka: Interface California Corp., 1978. 

   Courtesy of California Historical Society. Alvord Award, 1881. Maker unknown. Medallion 1 -1/2 inches, diameter; overall dimensions: 3 inches height x 2 -9/16 inches width. Gold, cat’s eye shell, turquoise beads. California Historical Society, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Mark Carpenter.       

In 1890, Carpenter married John Wilz Napier Hudson, who had trained in medicine in Nashville and come to Ukiah to work as a physician. He later became a scholar of Pomo culture and an important collector of their baskets. Grace Carpenter Hudson occupies a significant place in California history due to her lifetime of art production, which includes more than 680 paintings, mostly of Pomo peoples in the region. For more information, please visit http://www.gracehudsonmuseum.org/.

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Additional Notes

1. Quotes from Oscar Kunath’s letter are courtesy the Grace Hudson Museum, City of Ukiah; Acc. #2018-1-2. While the letter is not dated, Karen Holmes, curator of collections and exhibitions, believes it was written in the spring of 1880. A Daily Alta newspaper clipping, dated December 24, 1881, and held in the museum’s archives, states that Carpenter had been a student for eighteen months when she received the award. For a brief history of the formation of the San Francisco Art Association and its evolution into today’s San Francisco Art Institute see Betty Hoag McGlynn, “The San Francisco Art Association,” in Plein Air Painters of California, The North, ed. Ruth Lilly Westphal (Irvine, CA: Westphal, 1986), 16–19.

2. The marble Ares Borghese may itself be a copy of an earlier bronze (now lost) from the fifth century BCE. The statue was among 344 antiquities that entered the collections of the Louvre in 1807, via purchase by Emperor Napoleon from Camillo Borghese, Sixth Prince of Sulmona and husband of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister. In 1884 it transferred to Cambridge University by sale, and its record in the Museum of Classical Archaeology Databases notes that “it may represent Achilles” [the title of Carpenter’s drawing], and that it “has also been recently proposed that the sculpture was a Roman original created through Augustan propaganda to cast Augustus’s heir and grandson, Gaius, as ‘the New Ares.’” The statue’s height is 211 cm, or slightly under seven feet. Hudson’s drawing’s subject has remained identified as Achilles since the contest, although recent research conducted by Marcus and Rosalie Wardell confirms the actual source of the plaster cast.

3. Although unconfirmed at this time, it is possible that the numeral 3, shaped by erasure and located in the lower-right corner of the drawing, may be Carpenter’s entry number. Additionally, while Carpenter was not a trained jeweler, it is highly likely she chose the centerpiece for her brooch and approved its design.

4. The original Portrait of Grace Carpenter may have been taken at her parents’ studio in Ukiah, though the actual photographer is unknown and the tintype does not carry the “Carpenter” mount. The photograph of Achilles is believed to have been taken prior to the drawing and Alvord Award being given to CHS, with the photographer also unknown. The latter was used in Searles R. Boynton, The Painter Lady: Grace Carpenter Hudson (Eureka, CA: Interface California, 1978), 18.

5. Fellow artist and San Francisco–born Henry Percy Gray (1869–1952), also attended the San Francisco School of Design and participated in the contest in 1886. His submission is also in the collection of the California Historical Society, a gift of Dr. and Mrs. W. Scott Polland, 1970.

Art and object collections are available for researchers by inquiry and prearranged appointment through CHS’s North Baker Research Library.

Staff Picks: Highlights from the CHS Collection for American Archives Month

Every October the American archival community celebrates American Archives Month in order to celebrate and raise awareness of the value of archives, archivists, and the diverse collections in repositories across the country representing our collective history.

The CHS collections comprises a diverse body of materials which document the environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural heritage of California and contribute to a greater understanding of the state and its people. The collection includes:

• 50,000 volumes of books and pamphlets 
• 4,000 manuscript collections; 
• 500,000 photographs; 
• Printed ephemera, periodicals, posters, broadsides, maps, and newspapers; 
• The Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing; 
• 5,000 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and lithographs; 
• Artifacts and costumes 

For this year’s American Archives Month, we asked a few of our Exhibitions and Library & Archives department staff members to choose a piece (or collection) from the CHS archive, and to interpret it in their own word, or describe why it’s meaningful to them. First up is Jaime Henderson, CHS’ Digital Archivist, who chose 1930s images of Los Vaqueros lands.

Images of Los Vaqueros lands

From Horse Pasture Hill looking W. toward Black Hills across Dario Place, Photographs of Los Vaqueros lands, Contra Costa and Alameda counties, circa 1935, PC-026_12, California Historical Society

A man wearing jodhpur pants tucked into high boots leans against an outcropping of rocks, possibly a walking stick or telescope gripped in his hand, gazing onto a valley dotted with low trees, dark hills and an even darker sky looming in the background. Another image shows a low mountain range in the distance, gnarled, leafless oak trees in the foreground. Like many great California landscapes scenes shot by well-known photographers, the image is well-composed and captures the natural exquisiteness and moodiness of the state’s terrain. But unlike Yosemite or Big Sur, the landscape, although stunning, is not obviously identifiable. That is until I take a closer look at the caption which provides such preciseness of place. The caption contains a series of letters and numbers that I am able to identify as surveyor coordinates. Names of places such as Black Hills, Brushy Peak and the surnames of landowners, Dario and Cabral provide a few more clues. Eventually, I piece together that the land is a rural valley situated in eastern Contra Costa county and portions of northeast Alameda County. The region today looks remarkably similar to the landscape captured in the photographs years ago.

The photographs shown here are only four examples of a collection of twenty-five platinum prints held in the archives of the California Historical Society. The collection, Photographs of Los Vaqueros lands of Contra Costa and Alameda counties, records both visually and geographically, this pastoral parcel of land situated in the shadow of Mount Diablo toward the northwest and flanked by low, grassland hills to the east and the rugged Black Hills to the west. Although the photographer is unknown, the captions, most of which include geographic coordinates, suggest that the photographs were taken as part of a surveying project of the Los Vaqueros lands, most likely undertaken in the mid-1930s as ownership of the lands passed from their much-revered owner Mary Crocker to family members and friends after her death. The time period in which the photographs were taken marks the beginning of drastic change to the communities built in Los Vaqueros, although this change is not reflected in the region’s natural landscape capture in the photographs.

Inside caves near Brushy Peak, Photographs of Los Vaqueros lands, Contra Costa and Alameda counties, circa 1935. PC-026_01, California Historical Society

The first Californians deeply understood the majesty of what would come to be called Los Vaqueros. Archeologists have found evidence of human activity in the region dating back nearly 10,000 years, making Los Vaqueros lands one of California’s earliest known sites of human activity. For centuries, groups made long-term use of the land for hunting, occupation, and community building. Before the arrival of the Spanish to the greater Bay Area and Delta region, the Volvon peoples of the Miwok tribe and the Ssaoam peoples of the Costanoan tribe seasonally hunted, gathered, traded and lived in communities in what would become Los Vaqueros.

The land's natural features, most especially the caves and outcroppings of rocks located in the most eastern part of the region, are described in the Native Californians' creation myths where Coyote, in deep grief over the loss of his son, walks through the sandstone walls creating the holes and gorges of the Vasco Caves (1). Many of the Native Californians' creation stories were depicted in rock art on the walls of the Vasco Caves. As it was when the Native peoples inhabited the land, the land is still considered sacred among Native Californian groups and the pictographs are still visible on the caves' canvases. 

               

North side of lake, Photographs of Los Vaqueros lands, Contra Costa and Alameda counties, circa 1935, PC-026_08, California Historical Society

In the years following the founding of Mission San Jose in 1797, large herds of cattle belonging to the mission were grazed in the Los Vaqueros lands, introducing the practice of large-scale livestock ranching to the region. The practice continued once the land was granted to three brothers-in-law and officially named Cañada de los Vaqueros (Valley of the Cowboys) in 1844. The region’s excellent pastures gave rise to battles over grazing rights and litigation over the ownership of lands throughout the second-half of the 19th century. Through these disputes practice of large scale grazing continued, taking effect on the landscape, spreading non-native grasses eroding natural drainage and impacting native tree species (R to R, pg. 8). Ranching on the lands only began to phase out in the mid-1870s as the land grant began to be subdivided into smaller tenant farms and ranches, prompting a shift that incorporated grain cultivation with livestock ranching. The introduction of a more diverse agriculture and immigrant families of German, Italian, French and Basque descent helped to transition Los Vaqueros from a valley of isolated, ranching cowboys to a community of family farms that developed out of their reliance on shared skills, resources and crops. The transition marks both a natural change for the region, but also the development of a communal identity amongst the Los Vaqueros residents. Between 1900 and 1935 the Los Vaqueros community, geographically isolated from the social and civic changes occurring in the greater Bay Area, created network of multicultural residents that relied on each other for economic, social, and emotional support.

Much can be said in regards to the stability of land ownership in Los Vaqueros to facilitate the growth of community spirit. Most residents were tenant farmers who rented that land from Mary Crocker. Crocker may not have spent much time on the land, but had hired the much admired Charles Lamberton to manage the tenant holdings. The pair provided a sense of stability that allowed tenants to invest in the land and commit to its community. In 1918, while the land was under Crocker’s ownership, an article printed in the Byron Times praised the rolling hills and valleys of Los Vaqueros “one of the most beautiful pastoral spots of the Golden State.” (2)

The long-lasting effects of the economic Depression of 1929, coupled with the untimely death of Mary Crocker in an automobile accident brought about an end to many of the tenant family farms and community oriented existence of Los Vaqueros. Crocker’s heirs sold the land and new owners did not uphold many of the lease agreements with the tenant farmers who had helped build the Los Vaqueros community (3). Some of the land had remained in the hands of its original owners who had acquired it in the later part of the 19th century, but by the 1960s and 1970s much of the Los Vaqueros lands had been returned to grazing pastures.

From hill looking across Stanley Cabral’s grain field toward Black Hills, Photographs of Los Vaqueros lands, Contra Costa and Alameda counties, circa 1935, PC-026_17, California Historical Society 

Today the land, located in the Diablo Range in the shadow of Mount Diablo, is sheltered from the crush of Interstate 580 cutting through the Livermore Valley moving thousands of commuters to and from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta communities and the San Francisco Bay Area and the ever-developing suburban housing tracts that sprawl further and further into the deep east of the East Bay. Two major civic initiatives have protected the land from the encroachment of development and have allowed the land to retain its pastoral beauty that had earlier been celebrated in the Byron Times. In 1988 Contra Costa county voters approved funding for the Contra Costa County Water District’s (CCWD) Los Vaqueros Reservoir project.

The reservoir was completed in 1998 and was expanded in 2012, growing its capacity to provide water for over 500,000 customers while also protecting the natural and historic resources located in the watershed (4). The CCWD has also partnered with East Bay Regional Park District to steward the Vasco Caves Regional Preserve, providing protection to both endangered and native species and plants of the Los Vaqueros region and preserving sacred native California sites, including the 10,000 year old rock art found on the walls of Vasco Caves depicting the creation myths that took place on the Los Vaqueros lands.

This post was written by Jaime Henderson, Digital Archivist at the California Historical Society.

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(1) Ziesing, Grace H. ed., From Rancho to Reservoir: History and Archaeology of the Los Vaqueros Watershed, California. Report prepared for the Contra Costa Water District (1997), 19.
(2) Byron Times, (1918), 58.
(3) Ziesing, From Rancho to Reservoir, (1917), 124. 

(4) Los Vaqueros Project History. Contra Costa Water District. Retrieved 2018 March 14 from https://www.ccwater.com/435/Los-Vaqueros-Project-History.

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