"Out here it is different" : the California Camera Club and community imagination through collective photographic practices : toward a critical historiography, 1890-1915 / Carolin Görgen.

[Paris, France?] : [Université Sorbonne Paris Cité?], 2018.

666 pages ; 30 cm

BEIN Zc72 +2018go: Wrappers.

The California Camera Club, a collective of amateur and professional photographers, most active in San Francisco between 1890 and 1915, represents a constantly marginalized organization in the history of photography and of the American West. By adopting a two-fold cultural-historical and material approach, this thesis sheds light on a largely unknown variety of Club activities and productions that served as meaningful elements to forge the identity of a remote Western community. Through its inclusive outlook, unifying more than 400 members in 1900, the Club must be considered a locally embedded organization that mobilized photography to produce an aesthetically pleasing and historically coherent narrative of the city and the state. Despite its chronological position in the period of Pictorialism and the striving for institutional recognition, the Club corpus cannot be inserted into an art-historical canon of photography. Rather, by drawing on diverse strategies of dissemination and exhibition, the members adopted a collective approach to the medium that turned the striving for institutional recognition into a desire for regional legitimation. Through an examination of photographic practices, uses, and object trajectories, this thesis traces the construction of an idiosyncratic representation of Californian culture and history by the Club, which actively assisted the state's search for a legitimate national place. By focusing on the collective dimension of photography, the analysis demonstrates how the practice in an isolated territory led to the imagination of a community with shared aesthetic and historical understandings. The object of this thesis is to revise both linear and narrow tropes in the history of photography by broadening its geographic, sociocultural, archival perspectives.

Books / Dissertations & Theses

English

September 11, 2019

Thesis (doctoral)--Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2018.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 547-632) and index.

France Paris.