1These nostalgic reflections of a Californian photographer in the early 20^th century express both a romanticization of the Gold Rush of 1849 and an anxiety about photography’s inability to fully document the migrations and labors of the historic event. Looking back half a century later, as the Gold Rush and stories of western conquest began to coalesce into foundational myths filling “the annals of the pioneers”, many realized that their epic stories of migration to and settlement in California had only ever been partially pictured in photography. Their full spectacle was lost to technological limitations of the medium shortly after its emergence in 1839, a mere decade before the Californian gold discovery. While the visual record of the Gold Rush exists in daguerreotype plates of miners and boom towns, stopovers in Panama, Isthmus crossings, and other crucial transit points have barely made it into photographic archives (Aspinwall J., 2019). Yet by the early 20^th century, awareness of this visual absence also generated a new kind of mandate: as Californians took up the newly accessible and technologically advanced medium of photography in large numbers, forming the largest U.S. camera club in San Francisco in 1900, many ventured out into the western landscape in an attempt to recover stories of earlier settlement (Görgen C., 2025). Following the U.S. acquisition of the Panama Canal project from France in 1904, the Isthmus crossing was reimagined not as a forgotten route, but as a vital link in a longer story of U.S. continental expansion and imperial ambition. Photography became central to this reframing.

2By 1915, Americans celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco. By then, photography was able to capture and accompany transcontinental voyages and engineering projects. The camera had in fact become an imperial instrument, that is, a visual tool capable of both commemorating territorial expansions of the late 19^th century and imagining new ones of the 20^th century (Quanchi M., 2015). The Panama-Pacific International Exposition did more than just celebrate the technological triumphs of canal construction under U.S. supervision. For Americans—and especially Californians—the completion of the Panama Canal made San Francisco the geostrategic location of a westering empire, echoing its role in the mid-19^th century as migrants from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia flocked toward the gold mines on the western edge of the continent. While Americans from the East Coast embarked on months-long voyages to the West via the overland trail in 1849, those who traveled from New York to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama reached the “instant” Gold-Rush city within less than six weeks (McGuinness A., 2008: 32). To emphasize California’s historical connection to the Isthmus and the state’s future grandeur promised by the canal’s connection between Atlantic and Pacific, photographers attempted to retrofit the historical imagination of the American West. They projected a future of engineered abundance, visually linking the Panama Canal and Californian resources through photography.

3This article argues that the construction of the Panama Canal—and its celebration during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco—was critical to reimagine California’s long relationship with the environment, rooted in the Gold Rush and reimagined through conquest and engineering. Photography became a central agent in producing an “imperial ecology”: a visual regime that imagined western nature, engineering technology in both California and Panama, and U.S. imperial ambition as harmoniously aligned. While this argument builds on the historiographical foundations of ecological imperialism as articulated by Alfred Crosby (1986), Richard Grove (1994), and more recently Sumit Guha (2023), it differs in emphasis. Rather than focusing on the biological or environmental processes that enabled imperial expansion, I use imperial ecologies to analyze the aesthetic and representational systems—especially in photography—that made environmental transformations appear coherent, inevitable, and even desirable. In this sense, the article emphasizes the role of images in naturalizing infrastructural change and canal building, despite their significant environmental toll.

4At the PPIE, held less than a decade after San Francisco’s near-total destruction through an earthquake and fire in 1906, photography and its various material iterations helped produce this visual vocabulary. The camera re-scripted California’s past and future by linking the Gold Rush to the Panama Canal and the closing of the western frontier to global empire. The rebuilding of San Francisco and the opening of the canal were framed as parallel feats of U.S. ingenuity, made legible through the camera. With the city rebuilt and the canal completed, San Francisco would become the connecting link of a nation whose “pioneering” citizens had completed settlement on the continent and now looked toward the Pacific. The fair’s various attractions—including replicas of western American landscapes—framed nature itself as an imperial resource that could be exploited and even reproduced. Such entertainment displays “magnified” stories of frontier conquest, settlement, and engineering (Bennet T., 1986). The PPIE thus re-situated western landscapes as assets in a Pacific-facing U.S. empire of abundant resources, turning both the Panama Canal and the western outdoors into ideologically “charged spaces” (Moore S., 2013: 43-44).

5During the construction of the Panama Canal, Californian photographers played a central role in translating U.S. expansionism into an imperial environmental ideology. In other words, their photographs helped articulate a worldview that treated nature as a resource to be controlled and reshaped, that made extraction and conquest appear natural and progressive, and in which visual documentation itself became a form of possession that reinforced U.S. technological and imperial dominance. To understand the imperial visual culture of the 1915 fair, we must return to the earliest photographic expressions of the California-Panama connection that started in the mid-19^th century. I will therefore first trace how construction of the Panama Canal became entwined with Californian Gold-Rush memory in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I will then explore how the Canal, as it approached completion in 1914, became associated with a much broader imagination of abundance through hydraulic transformation, notably by linking it to the reconstruction of San Francisco’s water supply before the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Ultimately, I will analyze the visual script furnished by the Exposition to imagine an imperial future for California, made possible by the Panama Canal.

“La California”—The Panama Canal, the Gold Rush, and Imperial Reveries

6Beginning in December 1848, as news of gold discovery in Northern California spread across the globe, California and Panama became inextricably linked. The gold finds and ensuing rush for wealth that Panamanians would come to describe as “La California” significantly transformed not only the soon-to-be U.S. state, but led to considerable changes in Panama itself. Rapidly, the region around the Isthmus became a crucial artery that would pump people, goods, and money into Gold-Rush California. Within a few years, the “Panama Route” became the most widely used itinerary for U.S. travelers who preferred the passage via the Isthmus over the overland route across the continent or maritime travel via Cape Horn. In the mid-19^th century, San Francisco was arguably more closely connected to Central and South America than to Washington, D.C.—a point underscored by the fact that news of the Gold Rush reached Mexico and Chile before it even reached the White House, as Aims McGuinness has shown. In the first dozen years alone, between 1848 and 1860, more than 200,000 people sought out the Central American route—a passage that was facilitated by the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855 and that fueled an economic boom in both California and Panama (McGuinness A., 2008: 5-7, 32).

7Passengers across the Isthmus and later the Panama Railroad included not only laborers eager to extract wealth from the earth, but also a large number of suppliers to the newly developing Californian economy. Among those were a handful of photographers, including daguerreotypist William Shew from Boston. Equipped with his portable gallery, Shew would become part of a prolific community of photographers who set up studios and advertised their picture-taking businesses in the Alta California newspaper from 1849 onward (Palmquist P., 1980: 208-209). Daguerreotypy was a tedious process whose cumbersome equipment and long exposure times did not allow for spontaneous outdoor photography. Only few outdoor views could be produced and preserved to the present day, as photographs also tended to serve as sources for printed materials, such as lithographs and engravings, and would be destroyed once used (Sandweiss M.A., 2002: 87-120). The few surviving views of San Francisco Shew produced include a panorama of the harbor in 1852 (Fig. 1). At first glance, the crowded view—with makeshift shacks in the foreground, a forest of ship masts at the center, and homes populating the peninsula in the background—seems to confirm the city’s prosperous development. The dense set-up of ships gestures at successful settlement; their vertical spires echo the built environment, as if passengers had disembarked and immediately set about constructing a city.

8Yet a closer inspection reveals signs of decay: a broken-off mast juts into the foreground, and the jumbled arrangement of ships actually shows their abandoned state, as they were left behind by sailors who had arrived via Cape Horn. These decomposing vessels not only marked the infrastructural toll of transnational migration but also became physical residues of the Gold Rush, now stranded at the edge of a westering United States. In fact, the ships would become sediments of expansion itself. As Joanna Dyl has shown, the wreckage of such ships was used as infill to expand San Francisco’s shoreline: it was part of the “made ground” upon which the city would be constructed and that made it all the more prone to destruction during earthquakes, as such artificial terrain liquefies during seismic events (Dyl J., 2017: 41-42).

9Despite the conflicted environmental legacies that such a close reading reveals, photographs like Shew’s helped shape imaginaries of abundance for travelers heading to California via Panama. Similar to the term “La California” and its evocative potential of wealth, Gold-Rush photographs offered a visual fantasy of prosperity that fueled the flow of capital and labor via the Isthmus. City views promised flourishing trade, while portraits of Euro American miners ostentatiously displayed gold nuggets found in the field. The visual record echoed the exclusionary politics of early California that targeted Indigenous, Mexican, African American, and Asian laborers’ access to the mines. Few depictions of such marginalized miners survive. Instead, the white miners’ plowing through the lands was equated with progress. Steadily advancing technologies—moving from shovels and pickaxes to high-pressure hydraulic nozzles—were framed as advanced devices in promotional literature, while the same publications described the techniques of non-white miners as inefficient and outdated (Aspinwall J., 2019: 146). Such exclusionary visual tropes persisted in Californian photography well into the late 19^th century, as amateur photographers took up the increasingly accessible medium as a hobby. Retracing the steps of earlier photographers—now equipped with hand-held cameras and more suitable outdoor equipment—Californian amateurs celebrated the memory of the Gold Rush in lectures and magazines, integrating and perpetuating the racialized visual politics of the 1850s (Görgen C., 2025: 164-167).

10As much as Californians in Camera Craft lamented the absence of proper photographic documentation of the passage across the Isthmus—as expressed in the epigraph to this article—the U.S. control over the Canal Zone from 1904 gave American photographers new opportunities to travel there. Embarking on a Gold Rush-journey in reverse, dozens of photographers flocked from San Francisco down to Panama; some among them perhaps hoped to fill the archival void left by the poorly documented Isthmus crossings of earlier decades, as Camera Craft writers of the early 1900s implied. While the Isthmian Canal Commission as the U.S. authority over construction hired official photographer Ernest Hallen (whose work is discussed in the following section) in 1907, other practitioners—professional and amateur alike—traveled to the Central American coast to document the evolution of the project in a variety of prints, slides, and albums. It is important to note here that western American amateur and professional productions largely overlapped in this period, as Euro American audiences readily absorbed booster discourses of U.S. expansionism into their photographic practice, especially along the West Coast (Moore S., 2013: 60-61; Görgen C., 2025: 200-202).

11One such amateur production—an album created by an anonymous practitioner in the late 1900s and titled “Travels of a Tramp”—documents a journey from San Francisco to Panama by sailboat. After stops in Mexico and Costa Rica, the album presents a visual chronicle of Colón (a major port and trade center) and Empire (a key site in the Canal Zone). The album opens with a self-portrait of the traveler: dressed in a sombrero, hiking boots, and a bindle slung over his shoulder, he performs the figure of the wandering westerner. This iconography echoed romanticized portrayals of itinerant white men in earlier frontier narratives. As the album progresses, the photographer constructs a visual arc that links Spanish colonial heritage with American engineering. Images of 17^th-century Spanish fortresses on the Pacific coast (like Fort Acapulco) give way to views of the rapidly developing town of Empire—the literal imperial outpost, newly expanded under U.S. supervision of the Canal Zone.

12Within the Canal Zone, the photographer juxtaposes industrial scenes—railroads, loading docks, construction sites—with views of labor and segregation. On a single album page (Fig. 2), he assembled two contrasting images of housing in Empire: one shows seven Black children standing before a rickety wooden shack, with a seated female caretaker at their side; the other shows a wide-angle view of the American residential area with stately homes perched on a hillside, connected by paved roads and power lines. The contrast is striking. The fragile, uneven foundation of the Black family’s home stands in stark opposition to the elevated infrastructure of the U.S. quarters, reminiscent of the photographic documentation of similar “American-style company towns” in South America, as Ricardo Salvatore has shown (Salvatore R., 1998: 88-89). The iconography of respectability used for the white American quarters even slightly echoes San Francisco’s Gold-Rush views, depicting signs of “civilization” and refinement on the last outpost of empire (Birt R., 1999: 100-122). The American quarters in Panama become a sort of San Francisco in reverse, promising future grandeur made accessible through U.S. engineering.

13The racialized views of living quarters in Empire resonate with what Joan Flores-Villalobos has called an “‘American style’ segregation”, established by the early 20^th-century hiring practices of the Isthmian Canal Commission. The zone’s economy was structured by a binary payment system: U.S. and white Spanish workers were paid in gold, while West Indian laborers received silver wages. The currencies were themselves racially coded—“gold as white, silver as Black”—and West Indian women, like the caretaker in the photograph, played a vital if often overlooked role in sustaining the Canal Zone’s labor system (Flores-Villalobos J., 2023, 1-18). The visual narrative of the seemingly ordinary travel album framed how landscape, labor, and engineering should be understood and valued. In so doing, the photographs naturalized racial hierarchies in the Canal Zone, fitting squarely within the “imaginary economy” of labor photography which tended to legitimize power structures (Sekula A., 1983; Coleman K. and James D., 2021). The amateur photographer, who carefully laid out this narrative in a specially compiled album with captions for each print, not only produced but solidified such understandings in the curated space of the album that could be collectively viewed and shared (Edwards E., 1999).

Imaging Engineering / Imagining Abundance

15Advertisement for San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition promised a grand economic future tied to the completion of the Panama Canal: “It will annihilate distance, wipe out the width of two continents between New York and Yokohama, [and] make the Atlantic seaboard and Pacific Coast neighbors”. The Canal would collapse geography through a new technology of spatial mastery. This description conjured up a fantasy of instantaneous movement and circulation resembling what geographers have called “time-space compression” (Harvey D., 1990), enabled here by U.S. engineering. The very suggestion that Atlantic and Pacific could become “neighbors” implied that U.S. power would now seamlessly span from coast to coast, pulling the entire space between New York and Yokohama into its orbit. Photographs fueled the imaginative potential of such descriptions, as professional prints and amateur snapshots documented construction of the canal. Their works translated engineering into spectacle and marked the public understanding of the event (Moore S., 2013: 60).

17When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Canal Zone in 1906, he was famously photographed operating a steam shovel. This portrait, as Sarah Moore has argued, “conflated body, machine technology, and national manhood”, while sidelining the racialized labor force that enabled the project (Moore, 2013: 57-58; Greene, 2009: 16-18). Roosevelt’s embrace of such imagery is part of a broader visual culture of empire—one that celebrated technological feats as symbols of national identity and masculine power. This iconography had clear precedents in the American West, a region particularly dear to Roosevelt. In Figure 3, steam shovels #222 and #230 meet in the canal bed after blasting their way through the Continental Divide from either side of the future canal. The meeting point of the machinery echoes views of the completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad. Almost half a century earlier, in May 1869, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads had met in Promontory, Utah, “shaking hands” on their way to California in an equally charged gesture (Fig. 4).

18The rails connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and made the overland route—especially to California—faster and more comfortable than the journey via Cape Horn. The railroad also opened up a faster route to Asia from the U.S. East Coast. Like Hallen, 19^th-century photographers Alfred Hart and Andrew J. Russell documented railroad construction in hundreds of prints. These would be reproduced in a variety of formats, including stereo views that offered a three-dimensional, immersive experience of the railroad inching its way across the continent (Willumson, 2013). The 1 800-mile construction project—carried out by a 90% Chinese workforce in the 1860s—was comparable only to the Suez Canal built in Egypt in the same period. However, given the absence of the Isthmian connection back then, the vast majority of supplies for the transcontinental railroad needed to be shipped to California via Cape Horn (Chang G., 2019: 56-64).

19The echoing iconographies of May 1869 and May 1913 were more than a celebration of industrial progress. They also repeated a narrative of continental unification: the “golden spike” of 1869 marked the imagined fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, i.e., white settler conquest of the American West. A photograph like Russell’s thus symbolized technological triumph, successful western expansion, and national reconciliation after the Civil War. The transcontinental railroad considerably altered travel and commerce, and for the next half century, the U.S. would be “the only advanced capitalist country in the world that enjoyed year-round direct access to both the Atlantic and the Pacific” (Chang G., 2019: 7). Yet the celebratory image also masked conflict: fierce corporate competition, the exploitation of Chinese workforce, and the railroad’s seizure of Indigenous lands that were transformed by the rail project (Willumson, 2013).

20Almost half a century later, in Panama, semi-automatic steam shovels also met in a landscape, cleared not for settlement but for commerce, thus creating a new hemispheric connection—with laborers almost entirely absent from the picture. While the completion of the transcontinental railroad would furnish rapid access to California’s resources and lands, reducing the trip to the U.S. West Coast to as little as four days, the completion of the Panama Canal promised the rapid movement of people, goods, and ideas across the Isthmus. Just as westerners had documented the completion of the railroad, Hallen’s methodical sequence of images amplified the transformation of the Isthmus. His sequence of thousands of views turned the radical changes in the environment into “a magical process, in which mountains are moved and mammoth trenches cut” (quoted in Longwell D., 1976: 125). Much like the visual histories of western expansion, Hallen’s photographs turned ecological disruption into a national spectacle. His before-and-after views replaced inherent violence with technological “magic”, thus legitimizing ecological imperialism. A view of the completed canal with a sailboat quietly traversing the Culebra Cut toward the North suggested that the Gold-Rush dream had been made real (Fig. 5; see also Fig. 1).

21As San Franciscans prepared for the 1915 fair, the language of “annihilation” used in advertisement for canal-building also held a deeper—and darker—meaning for many of its advocates. While the idea of commemorating the Panama Canal in San Francisco had been evoked in the early 20^th century—given the longstanding connection between the city and the Isthmus, as explained in the previous section—the plan was cut short on April 18, 1906, when an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.9 on the Richter scale struck the city. The seismic shift was a violent reminder of the many earthquakes that had shaken the Euro American settlement over the course of the second half of the 19^th century; what made it worse, however, were the three days of firestorms that ensued. Across the city, gas pipes had cracked after the early morning tremor. They rapidly set entire neighborhoods ablaze as firefighters were in dire need of water supply. With some 80% of the city in ruins and more than half of the 400,000-population homeless, the Gold-Rush metropolis—then 8^th-largest city in the United States—had itself been nearly “wiped out” (Fradkin P.L., 2005).

23The frenzy of urban reconstruction was spurred by an engineering project 250 kilometers east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada that would finally address the city’s long-standing water crisis. Access to water had become especially pressing after the 1906 earthquake and fire, when firefighters had to improvise in the face of depleted reservoirs. In response, city officials now openly endorsed a long-discussed, controversial project in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, north of Yosemite. It intended to create a reservoir large enough to supply residents of the sprawling San Francisco Bay Area. Just as the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, construction started on the Hetch Hetchy dam following the passage of the Raker Act in the U.S. Congress in late 1913. The act authorized the flooding of a valley that had long been inhabited and used by Miwok and Paiute peoples, and was now part of Yosemite National Park. Debated fiercely until the final congressional vote in 1913, the Hetch Hetchy dam revealed a rift between early U.S. environmentalists. The debate opposed preservationists—such as Sierra Club-founder John Muir—and conservationists. While the former argued for leaving the Valley untouched, notably due to its “Yosemite-like” rock formations and the future vulnerability of national parks, the latter stressed that natural resources should be used for the public good (Smith M., 1987: 174-185; Righter R., 2016). To President Roosevelt, U.S. stewardship of lands and rivers seemed to prove yet again the supposed “superiority” of Euro American societies. The conservation agenda thus justified the dispossession of Indigenous Americans, including the Seven Traditionally Associated Tribes of Yosemite, under the banner of progress and future “protection” of resources (Tyrell I., 2015: 16; Powell, 2016: 46-47). Similarly, the hydraulic project in Panama had asserted U.S. control over land, labor, as well as the various “gente de color”, including persons of African and Indigenous descent (McGuinnes A., 2008: 22-23). In imperial fashion, Americans had “taken a piece of Colombia to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal”, thus creating its very own “workshop of empire”, in the words of Greg Grandin (Grandin G., 2006: 3).

24In the early 20^th century, as Robert Righter has argued, the Panama Canal and the Hetch Hetchy dam were the most ambitious civil engineering feats of their time, and their respective engineers—George Goethals and Michael O’Shaughnessy—emerged as emblematic figures who “ushered in a modern world of abundance” (Righter R., 2005: 231). As parallel projects of mastery over challenging environments, the Panama Canal and the Hetch Hetchy dam promised perpetual access to two of the most vital resources of urban life and imperial projects: fresh water and global mobility. Both projects shared a visual language of scale and spectacle that reinforced an imperial ecological worldview.

25Accompanied over the course of almost two decades by a variety of San Franciscan professional photographers, including Horace Chaffee and Gabriel Moulin, O’Shaughnessy documented the rapid transformation of a seemingly pristine Valley into a manmade concrete basin. In one photograph (Fig. 6), the stark granite backdrop—indeed recalling the contours of Yosemite’s El Capitan (Tutokanula in Miwok)—frames the crusher plant in the foreground, a machine designed to process rocks for concrete. The image suggests a direct continuity between the rocky cliffs and the engineered structure rising at their feet. Workers on the scaffolding blur once again into the machinery which seems to rise toward the sky, obscuring the laborers and materials that were transported to clear the Valley, as well as the blasting of tunnels for the excavation of the dam. Similar to photographs of the Panama Canal, the visual documentation of earth-moving and hydraulic manipulation at Hetch Hetchy functioned as an imaginative scenario. Just as the Chagres River was dammed to create Gatun Lake—a large artificial reservoir facilitating the passage of ships through the Panama Canal—in California’s Sierra region, the Tuolumne River was dammed and the Hetch Hetchy Valley flooded. As one imperial project was completed in 1914, the other commenced, both naturalized in photographs.

26For San Francisco, the construction at Hetch Hetchy meant the promise of reliable, long-term water supply to a growing metropolis acutely aware of its vulnerability after the 1906 disaster. This abundance of water was not just for survival—it enabled fire prevention, sanitation, and furthered industrial and agricultural activities in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, the Panama Canal promised a different but similarly transformative kind of abundance: the accelerated movement of goods, people, and ideas between oceans, which would reshape the geography of global commerce. By cutting weeks off shipping routes and opening new pathways for U.S. exports and military, the canal reinforced San Francisco’s imagined role as a Pacific gateway.

27In addition to gaining geopolitical clout through the canal, the city’s growth thanks to water from Hetch Hetchy reiterated its control of resources on its outskirts: similar to riches gained from gold and silver mining in the Sierras, the water surplus from the Hetch Hetchy Valley reinforced the city’s “urban power”, as Gray Brechin argued, leaving its surrounding environment as an “earthly ruin”. Californians had been warned of the consequences of this “pyramid of mining” (Brechin G., 1999: 13-70) that supplied San Francisco early on. A 1917 geology report even observed that hydraulic mining in the Sierras had moved quantities of sediment “nearly eight times as great as the volume moved in making the Panama Canal”, suggesting that California’s Gold Rush left behind an environmental footprint that rivaled the most ambitious imperial infrastructure of the period—the Panama Canal (Gilbert G.K., 1917: 43).

28Taken together, such engineering projects framed abundance as the result of infrastructural control over mountains, rivers, and oceans. They recast ecological disruption as modern necessity and technological ingenuity. The Californian dam and the Panama Canal both came to embody forms of “hydropower” which remains, as Matthew Henry has rightly stated, “just as important as fossil fuels to the functioning of the global capitalist system” (Henry M., 2016: 16). The spectacle of the completed Panama Canal and soon-to-be flooded Hetch Hetchy Reservoir were central to the visual and ideological fabric of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where engineering and mastery over resources coalesced.

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the Visual Script for an Imperial Future

29When the fair opened in February 1915, San Franciscans had long been familiar with the visual language surrounding the event (Fig. 7). Perham Wilhelm Nahl’s Thirteenth Labor of Hercules adorned all kinds of brochures, pamphlets, postcards, and magazines in the run-up to the event. The god of strength, embodying the United States, pulls open the gates of the canal. His gesture visually repeated the mythologized story of engineering, and mastery over nature Euro-American boosters liked to tell themselves. The viewer’s gaze is channeled through the steep canal walls toward a glistening city in the distance—a rebuilt San Francisco, on the edge of the now easily attainable Pacific Ocean. Sarah Moore has suggested that the Panama Canal’s “triumph of technology” over “chaotic nature” became directly linked to San Francisco’s emergence from the ashes after 1906 (Moore S., 2013: 5-6; 171-174; see also Salvatore R., 1998: 75). Perham Nahl’s own career perfectly echoed the Panama-California connection: he had studied first under his uncle—German-born painter Charles Nahl, who had been one of the first European painters in Gold-Rush California. Charles Nahl’s sketches of his 1850 Isthmus crossing accompanied the reveries in Camera Craft, quoted at the beginning of this article, while his nephew would promote the state’s attractions in 1915.

31Among these, the Court of Abundance stood out for its symbolic staging of the four elemental forces—earth, air, fire, and especially water. Similar to Nahl’s depiction of Hercules, photographers framed the fairgrounds in mythic terms, as seen in a dramatic nighttime depiction of the Court (Fig. 8). Produced as a lantern slide by the local California Camera Club, the image was designed for projection on a large screen in a darkened theater. It offered an immersive and collective encounter with the illuminated spectacle to the hundreds of regular attendees of such lectures (Görgen C., 2025: 204-207). Despite the absence of large fountains or cascades, water remained central to the Court of Abundance. It featured sculptures of aquatic plants and marine creatures, and the original architectural plan included a waterfall flowing from “unseen sources”. Although budget constraints prevented its installation, the court’s symmetrical pools and luminous ornamentation still evoked water. At night, electric flickers cast on its surfaces created ripples. The latter created an aesthetics of water that was, however, difficult to capture in period photographs (Ackley L., 2015: 117-118). In this way, the Court of Abundance transformed hydraulic marvels like the Panama Canal that linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans into theatrical depictions. The court was bordered by the Palaces of Mines, Transportation, Manufactures, and Varied Industries. This placed the very notion of abundance at the center of the visitor’s journey through resource- and infrastructure displays.

32If the Panama Canal dramatically reduced conceptions of time, as argued earlier, the PPIE itself aimed for what historians of the fair have called a “redefinition of space”. As part of the Zone’s popular amusements, the PPIE offered “gigantic miniature” versions of the Panama Canal as well as of the scenic wonders of the American West, yet again linking the two spaces (Moore S., 2013: 8-9; Belanger N. and Bonne E., 2015). Historian Laura Ackley has meticulously traced the replicas of Yellowstone—the nation’s first national park—and of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Both displays were ostentatiously sponsored by western railroads, including the Union Pacific, to lure fairgoers into the outdoors, which were more accessible from the Pacific Coast than from any eastern or Midwestern city. Most notably, a basin with a relief map of the park featured the bubbling geysers of Yellowstone and an almost 30-meter-high replica of Yellowstone Falls pumped some 37 000 liters of water per minute, again turning water into a plentiful resource. Visitors of the Grand Canyon replica would be taken on a thirty-minute railway tour, sensorily heightened by dust and burned sagebrush. Completing the tour, a nostalgic replica of a Gold-Rush mining camp next door looked back cheerfully on the early days of extraction. While none of these excessive displays were profitable, the reproduced landscapes in fact served as “giant advertisements” for the railroads (Ackley L., 2015: 245-246). In this way, the American West was recast as a living exhibit—“nature’s exposition” as guidebooks put it—in line with the recently launched “See America First” campaign, a nationalistic effort to promote domestic tourism across the American West as Europe was ravaged by war (Shaffer M., 2001).

33The reenactment of outdoor excursions echoed the “technological sublime” that railroad and engineering investors had pursued for decades (Nye D., 1994). As their machinery pierced through the land, their many promotional images depicted technological transformation not only as “natural” but as desirable—think back to photographs by Hallen and O’Shaughnessy (Figs. 3, 5, and 6). At the PPIE, these strategies reached a new level: long-familiar photographic images of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and even the Panama Canal—circulated in Camera Craft, travel albums, and souvenirs—were now embodied in immersive environments. Visitors walked through three-dimensional landscapes that had long been mythologized in photographs, now made accessible for immediate consumption in replicas. While David Nye’s notion of the “technological sublime” captures the awe inspired by engineering feats, the PPIE’s immersive environments also enacted an “imperial ecology” as previously mentioned: the fair’s displays aligned visual and technological spectacle with an ideology of environmental control that made landscapes appear as manageable, reproducible components of U.S. imperial expansion, not least since the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Importantly, the circulation of such imperial imaginaries, connecting California and Panama, was a direct outgrowth of new “technologies of representation” at a time when Pan-Americanism was on the rise and the United States advanced its “informal empire” (Salvatore R., 1998: 80-86). Along with the recreation of the Panama Canal in 1915, the replicas of the American West framed nature itself as an imperial resource: extractable, consumable, and ultimately even reproducible.

Conclusion

34Long before the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, the Isthmus was romanticized by Californians who imagined its passage as a gateway to future grandeur of their own state. From the imagined landscapes of the Gold Rush to the monumental infrastructures of canal-building in Panama and urban re-building in San Francisco, early 20^th-century visions of California and the Isthmian passage between the oceans were deeply entangled with imperial ecologies. Photography played a central role in shaping these visions, not merely documenting hydraulic and maritime achievements, but participating in the production of environmental fantasies—be it through daguerreotypes of boom towns, amateur albums of the Canal Zone, or official engineering views.

35At the Panama Pacific International Exposition, these fantasies reached their most theatrical expression: spectators collectively reveled in nighttime views of monuments built to “abundance”, while a fake Panama Canal appeared alongside recreated canyons and geysers, and a gold-mining camp invited visitors to relive the extractive origins of Californian wealth. These displays, and the images that preceded them, created an imperial vision in which water and land could be controlled and consumed. They also reflected the continuing expansionist fantasies of the U.S. political imagination—a vision that considered the “frontier” not as closed, as Frederick Jackson Turner notoriously argued at the dawn of the 20^th century, but as an ever-expansive resource (Cronon W., 1996: 622). Expanding the continent, in fact, went hand in hand with building a Pacific empire (McGuinnes A., 2008: 186). At the PPIE, the American West and the new, canal-linked Pacific were bound together by this vision.

36More than a century later, this imaginary remains relevant. Its imperial residue resurfaced at the 2025 presidential inauguration, when newly elected President Trump wistfully contemplated a new American empire reaching from the Arctic all the way to the Panama Canal. Rooting for an extractivism that considers all parts of the earth as potentially exploitable, framing its resources as “frontiers of conquest—rather than as home”, as Naomi Klein put it (Klein N., 2014: 170), the administration is on track for a new era of overexploitation. The language reminiscent of 19^th-century expansionism and the “annexation fantasies” articulated in Washington, D.C. in 2025 demonstrate that the environmental imaginaries of 1915 have not faded (Grandin G., 2025). They continue to shape how power and supposed progress are visualized and pursued today.