Reconsider: Photographs In (and Out) of the Museum

This intervention is concerned with how America chose to depict the national landscape across alternate historical moments. In addition to displaying artist books by Ed Ruscha (see previous post), late 19^th and early 20^th century photography will be exhibited from the California Historical Society archive in Special Collections at the USC Doheny Memorial Library. Specifically, the majority of images are from an extensive photography collection within the CHS’s holdings assembled between 1860 and 1930 by relatively unknown photographer C. C. Pierce. 

The collection includes images taken by Pierce but also numerous works by other western photographers. Some of the most well known images within the collection to be shown in the intervention are by George Fiske, whose photographs of Yosemite were widely distributed tourist items sold in the national park at the end of the 19^th century. In fact, an advertisement for Fiske’s studio was featured in Galen Clark’s 1910 tourist guidebook The Yosemite Valley: its history, characteristic features, and theories regarding its origin. In addition to Pierce and Fiske, the intervention will also utilize images by photographer Adam Dove (who I have been able to find no information on), as well as other anonymously produced pictures.

 George Fiske, Galen Clark on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, ca.1900, Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library

Advertisement for Fiske's Studio in The Yosemite Valley (1910)