"Californie 1900: Circulating California’s environmental imagination at the Paris world’s fair"

Begleiten Sie 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow & Fotohistorikerin Carolin Görgen am UCLA Department for European Languages and Transcultural Studies für einen Vortrag darüber, wie sich Kalifornien auf der Pariser Weltausstellung im Jahr 1900 präsentierte.

 

 

When the Paris world’s fair opened to the public in the spring of 1900, California was the only U.S. state to have its own representation. Carolin Görgen's talk explores the photo album Californie 1900, a photographic souvenir album assembled expressly for the fair. The album’s elaborate image sequence, accompanied by translations into French and German, transported a victorious narrative of conquest over the western American environment to European publics. At the same time, the myriad photographic illustrations also helped fashion California’s self-image in a period of growing nationalism – as the contributing photographers themselves concluded that “it is only through photography that the beauties of this state can be displayed to the East and to the rest of the world.” Looking at the album’s circulation from San Francisco to Paris and back, this talk aims to reconstruct how photographs shaped a dominant visual understanding of the American West.

 

With an introduction by Professor Kalani Michell.