- 1 Versions of this paper were presented at the “Silver Atlantic” conference at the Jeu de Paume in Pa (...)
1In the spring of 1900, when the Paris World’s Fair opened to tens of millions of visitors from across the globe, a group of photographers in San Francisco—9,000 kilometers away from the exhibition—reported on the cultural happenings in the French capital.1 Keenly aware of their distance to the artistic hubs of Europe, the photographers pondered strategies of carving out a place for the westernmost—and arguably most enticing—state of the American West on the international stage. In the pages of Camera Craft, the only photography magazine covering the West Coast, the editors suggested sending “thousands of pictures […] from California” to Paris, both for advertisement and for artistic display (“Editorial”). Thanks to long-standing collaborations between West-Coast photographers and the western railroads, California would be put on display in Paris as the apotheosis of a growing American West. Amid the vast and heterogeneous continental western United States, California’s unique settlement history, varied topography, and abundant resources captured the region’s broad appeal. Images of the Pacific Coast and the inland, of elegant streets in San Francisco and Sacramento, along with monumental landscapes at Yosemite and seemingly abundant resources all merged into a display of California as a land of possibilities. Aware of the role such images played in local settlement since the days of the Gold Rush, Californian photographers declared in 1900 that their medium would be the prime vehicle for defining the region beyond national borders (Aspinwall; Görgen 2025).
2Perhaps the most powerful object to embody their claims was an 80-page photographic brochure, entitled Californie: Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris 1900 (fig. 1). It had been designed specifically as a souvenir album of California’s representation at the world’s fair in the French capital that year. The photographers, publishers, and writers involved in its making—in the transatlantic space between San Francisco and Paris—shared the idea of photographic circulation as a powerful communicative tool. Illustrated with around one hundred photographic images, reproduced as halftones (a recent technology allowing for a rather inexpensive reproduction of photographs in the printed press), the album traced a selective and victorious history of the state from Spanish colonization to the rise of San Francisco as the ninth largest city in the United States. Evocative descriptions, translated from English into French and German—the most-spoken languages in western continental Europe—appealed to European audiences and at the same time instilled Californian lands with a dominant ideology that was attractive more generally to white westerners.
Fig. 1 E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
3Californie is a particularly intriguing source as it is the only souvenir of its kind produced and distributed by a single American state at the Paris fair. The railroad officials and local camera club members involved in its making promoted the state in text and image, attempting to distinguish California as an economic and cultural stronghold for a nation that had long turned toward the Pacific, not least since the Gold Rush. The Paris World’s Fair was the appropriate venue for this international mise-en-scène of both California and the United States. While at the previous Paris fair in 1889, the US government attached less importance to an adequate representation of its industries and arts, the exposition in 1900 was granted a million-dollar budget by the US Congress and three times as much exhibition space (Trocmé 37). The American pavilion on the Seine, at the Quai d’Orsay, with its fifty-meter dome, was adorned with Alexander Phimister Proctor’s Quadriga, a horse-drawn chariot “placed to appear leaping off the roof of the building,” thus crowning it with the virile strength associated with the imagined West (Burns 93). In the late nineteenth century, a wider public immersed in the growing visual culture of the American West progressively embraced a regional iconography to set themselves apart from Europeans, who had accused US immigrants to France of merely imitating the style en vogue at the Parisian academies. The conquest of the West and its monumental grandeur—dreamed up by Americans and Europeans alike—became a strategy to map out a distinct place for the United States, as art historian Emily Burns has demonstrated (87-88). Perhaps no state embodied this distinctiveness better than California: imagined as an island in the seventeenth century and instilled with pioneer mythologies from the moment it joined the union in 1850, the state embodied the last outpost of a growing continental empire. Once the “frontier” had been declared closed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, California’s strategic position on the Pacific promised a future beyond the seas, as the brochure’s images proclaimed.
4If the ambition of the Paris exposition was to take stock of the past century and to trace how far the nation had come, reconstructing the narrative of national progress was all the more meaningful to the United States. In the wake of the recent victory in the Spanish-American War, and the acquisition of former Spanish colonies, notably the Philippines and Guam, Puerto Rico and the Cuba protectorate, the United States embraced expansionism beyond its continental borders (Rydell et al. 45). California, a member of the union for barely half a century, found itself at the heart of the nation that was now coming of age and cultivated an imperial outlook toward the Pacific. The display of the United States as a newly imperialist nation was particularly desirable in Paris, showcasing American dominance amongst other colonizer nations, including France (Burns 149). The commissioner general for the Paris exhibition, Ferdinand Peck, captured this sentiment in 1899, when he announced in a preliminary report that “[t]he eyes of the world are now upon America, marvelling at its recent prowess upon the sea, and wondering what this Child of the West will do next” (33).
5Californian photographers, whose statewide networks were closely linked to the exhibition committee and its influential railroad contractors—most notably the Southern Pacific—integrated this discourse. The shift from isolationism to expansionism following the Spanish-American War coincided with the rising popularity of photographically illustrated publications, which reached ever-growing audiences and introduced them to the newly acquired territories of the expanding US empire. This new circulation of pictures would soon be accompanied by the compelling rhetoric of expansionism (Quanchi 213-217). In early 1900, Camera Craft editors even proposed the formation of a “Pacific League of camera clubs,” asserting that the only way to make a name for themselves would be through a West-Coast partnership and a combined outlook toward the Pacific (Erwin 14; Görgen 2025). I argue that while the album Californie promoted the state abroad as a promised territory for the United States at a moment of early twentieth-century imperialism, its photographic illustrations and narrative ultimately proved far more significant for Californians, rather than Parisians or a wider French audience. As becomes apparent in the claims of Camera Craft, the album reveals how the circulation of photographic objects participated in the shaping of a meaningful regional identity at a moment when state officials actively fashioned its history. Before analyzing the souvenir album, I will trace the presence of California and the imagined Wests in Paris, to then reconstruct the network and visions that shaped the album, and ultimately, its reception on both sides of the Atlantic.
6The development of a specifically western aesthetic—with California at its heart—dates back to the Paris world’s fair of 1867. Two years after the end of the American Civil War, the vast terrain of the West, from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Coast, became a place of national rebirth. Far removed from the sectional conflicts of North and South, the landscapes of the West seemed to promise a newly found unity in the shared appreciation of a majestic natural environment, along with myriad economic opportunities. Carleton Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite, produced at the height of the Civil War, traveled to the East—to Washington, D.C. and beyond—and turned California in particular into an ideological projection screen of recovery and renewal (Green 145-184). Watkins’s Yosemite emphasized its majestic, supposedly vacant character, freed from the violent dispossession of the Ahwahnechee by the Mariposa Battalion that had burned villages and captured inhabitants less than two decades earlier. At the same time, as they were reproduced on a large scale in stereo views and engravings, the landscapes lured investors to extract minerals, exploit agricultural resources, and eventually encourage settlement (Berger 13; Reznick). As François Brunet and Jessica Talley have suggested in their study of the 1867 Paris world’s fair, American exhibits aimed to “fashion primarily economic and political motives in artistically-minded objects and images.” The Watkins photographs displayed in large frames in Paris granted an unprecedented value to photographic images, ushering in an early moment of artistic recognition for the medium all the while depicting the western territories between the Rocky Mountains and California as a place of European American settlement (Brunet and Talley).
7By 1876, when the United States hosted its first exposition—the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia—Californian railroad operators largely financed the state’s representations. Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad significantly shaped the Californian image in the East and abroad, hiring lecturers and commissioning eye-catching displays. With Stanford, a former US Senator, and Huntington, a childhood friend of photographer Carleton Watkins, the two combined political and cultural clout. They were keenly aware of photography’s potential, multiplying opportunities to distribute their western visions in the press and in popular magazines (Willumson 109-123). By the close of the century, as the rail network expanded across the Southwest, from Los Angeles all the way to New Orleans, the company launched a genuine promotional machine. Sumptuous exhibits of regional products became the norm, with wines, grapes, and oranges, or traveling exhibitions across the East in railroad cars entitled “California on Wheels.” These innovative techniques of displaying and tasting influenced a settler-colonial reading of the environment, as historian Jarrod Hore argued, by demonstrating “control” over natural resources and over Indigenous stewards of the land (202). Concretely, such displays were key to California’s economic success, as well as to the increase in freight and passenger traffic on regional railroad lines (Orsi 137-141). Peck, the Paris commissioner, would make a similar observation for the US economy, stating that “the international expositions in which the United States has been interested have had an important and direct effect in increasing its exports” (1899 27).
8Historian Richard Orsi has rightly contended that “railway displays often made the difference between California’s having, or not having, adequate representation” at the nineteenth-century expositions (141). By the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, railroad commissioners went as far as transporting a sequoia from the southern Sierra Nevada to Chicago in an effort to provide material proof that countered the many incredulous reports of the sheer size of the big trees. The spectacle at the site of the felling, documented in photographs of armed lumberjacks, demonstrated the ambivalent depictions of grandeur and extraction, which I will discuss further on (Vermaas 96-134). The Paris commissioners envisioned a similar mise-en-scène in 1900, but eventually gave up on the project, given the many logistical challenges involved in transporting a ninety-meter tree with a circumference of more than twenty meters across the continent and the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Despite these grandiose and hardly realistic projects, managers of the Southern Pacific still exerted a remarkable influence on West-Coast representations. Shortly before the Paris opening in 1900, for instance, US state exhibitions were taken apart and classified according to production type, rather than regional origin. As this new arrangement rendered typically Californian products invisible, managers of the Southern Pacific “sent a separate display of its own that preserved the identity of the state, its sub-regions, and its towns and cities,” investing an additional $50,000. According to the managers, this display would prevent California from being “classified and sub-classified beyond recognition,” since the aim was “to show in the most graphic way the wonderful possibilities of the West,” notably through panoramic views, maps, and brochures like Californie (quoted in Orsi 141).
9To explore possible connections between the unique character of the Californian environment and French modernity, the publishers of Californie seemed to embrace both. The cover shows it best (fig. 1): the reddish-brown background immediately brings to mind the redwoods and sequoias, with undulating lines mimicking the rings of the ancient trees, and the golden lettering of Californie echoing the still recent Gold Rush past. Omnipresent throughout the album, the native Californian trees—many of them more than a thousand years of age—gave the region a mythological dimension, easily identifiable for both westerners and Europeans. To make up for “America’s lack of an ancient past,” they furnished the historical weight and “presaged the next long-lived empire,” as Lori Vermaas has suggested. As such, redwood-derived objects—such as cases, frames, columns, or medallions—were popular in many a state exhibit at the turn of the century (10-11; 121-124). In a Californian spin on Parisian styles, the cover also attempted to appeal to French audiences: while the palette of gold and red evoked California’s natural environment, the typography is reminiscent of the fashionable art-nouveau lettering, used notably for Hector Guimard’s Paris metro entrances inaugurated during the fair and at the soon-to-be iconic Paris department store La Samaritaine.
10While the album cover connected French style with Californian subject-matter, the US presence at the fair aimed beyond visual representation. At the start of the twentieth century, with the United States expanding beyond its continental borders, Americans desired to present themselves on an equal footing with European nations, driving home their victory against Spanish dominance in the Americas after 1898 and touting newly acquired Pacific territories. While the American pavilion on the Seine was meant to evoke the grandeur of the White City at the Chicago fair a few years prior, American exhibitors did not restrict their representation exclusively to their own building. Instead, US displays could be found, for instance, in the fine-art section at the Grand Palais or at the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade des Invalides, where American inventions in the mechanicals arts and agricultural machinery were distinctly exposed. An annex building at the Bois de Vincennes, in Paris’ East end, also demonstrated the latest railroad technology, including Californian engineering (Trocmé 39).
11If the railroad came to be such an influential player on the world’s fair stage, its success also stemmed from its reliance on the latest photographic technology and its roots in California’s growing art scene. The tentacles of this network are key to understand how a souvenir album like Californie could be produced and distributed. Given the commercial climate along the West Coast, the participation of photographers and artists in the booster business started in the mid-nineteenth century. Where cultural institutions were scarce but economic opportunities plenty, the works of painters, poets, and photographers were rapidly mobilized to “sell” California (Bernstein 65-101). From the 1890s, California Impressionist painters promoted the state in countless canvasses, echoing the discourses of the state’s foremost booster publication, such as Charles Lummis’s magazine Land of Sunshine (Landauer 14-18). Beyond painterly contributions, the works of photographers in San Francisco and Los Angeles particularly attracted railroad companies, which identified them as key to their promotional efforts. To this end, some 10 million items of promotional literature were published every year, from pamphlets and brochures to newspapers and magazines. These publications advertised the outdoor lifestyle of the coastal West, promoted the various cities, tourist attractions, and resorts available via railroad lines, and provided useful information on how to get there (Orsi 157-161). Many a local photographer would furnish illustrations to these publications.
12By the time of the Paris fair in 1900, California’s photo industry was thriving and home to a large market of professional photographers, printmakers, gallery owners, manufacturers, and store owners, along with a budding amateur scene (Palmquist). The San Francisco Bay Area, where the 400 members of the California Camera Club resided, was the largest photo hub on the West Cost. The Camera Club had been established in 1890, with the official photographer of the Southern Pacific—Howard Tibbitts—as one of the founding members. Thanks to Tibbitts, the Club and the railroad established a strategic partnership: the railroad sponsored excursions to Yosemite on special cars, while the photographers published the results of their outdoor activities in the pages of Sunset, the company’s magazine. Tibbitts, appreciated for his expertise, regularly provided illustrations for Camera Craft to encourage readers to sign up for these excursions and incite them to produce similarly enticing pictures (Görgen 2022). His view of El Capitan, reproduced in a Camera Craft outing report, resonates with the illustration of the granite monolith in Californie, serving as backdrop for an expansive view of the Valley and the Merced River (fig. 2, fig. 3). The proliferation of Yosemite views—in photography magazines like Camera Craft and in illustrated literature destined to the public writ large, notably at world’s fairs—served to consolidate the visitor experience of the Valley. Identical depictions of sites as “the best general view” reinforced the commodification and “quantification” of the natural environment, as Martin Berger argued (4-5).
Fig. 2 Howard C. Tibbitts, El Capitan, c. 1900. In “The California Camera Club’s Trip to the Yosemite,” Camera Craft vol. 3, no. 2, 1901, p. 68. Retrieved from the Internet Archive, original from the San Francisco Public Library.
Fig. 3 Yosemite Valley, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
13The makers of the Californie album mobilized a promotional style which blended this booster rhetoric with leisurely outdoor practice. Among the publishers was Edward Runyon, one of the earliest members of the Camera Club. Runyon partnered with Ben Truman, a prolific author who had published the promotional tract Semi-Tropical California a few years earlier (1876). Well aware of the latest developments in booster literature and in the photographic industry, Truman edited popular magazines such as The Wave and The Wasp, which relied on halftone illustrations from early on. In 1898, for example, a Club photographer and acquaintance of Runyon and Truman—Oscar V. Lange—for example illustrated The Wasp’s holiday edition with photographs of the city, inviting residents to contemplate recent improvements under Mayor James D. Phelan (Görgen 2025). Inspired by Progressive reform, the latter had planned for a major urban embellishment modeled upon the remaking of Paris under Baron Haussmann between the 1850s and 1870s. Envisioning Market Street as a grand avenue similar to the Champs Élysées, San Francisco aspired to the title of “Paris of the West” or “Paris of the Pacific,” as city leaders liked to call it (Brechin 185, 342).
Fig. 4. Market St Looking East, San Francisco, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
14In an effort to connect the ‘Paris of the West’ to Paris, France, the souvenir opens with a brief history of San Francisco, accompanied by views of the commercial district and the harbor (fig. 4). As our gaze is channeled towards the port via the bustling sidewalks of Market Street, readers grasp the strategic location facing the Pacific. To emphasize that San Francisco was no longer a mere outpost of the frontier, but a refined metropolis, the authors described the Bay as “a superb haven [...] [for] the commerce of the western world.” The photographs showcased measurable economic success, in the shape of large steamships, and civic order in the well-regulated downtown streets and elegant shopping facades. This iconography of urban refinement drew on a decades-long tradition, which dated not just back to Lange’s views in The Wasp. Indeed, from the Gold-Rush years in the 1850s, photographers like George Fardon had sought to depict San Francisco as a functioning and cultured town, rather than a lawless wild-west settlement (Birt 99-125; Görgen 2025).
15After this brief urban excursion, the majority of the album focuses on California’s natural resources, or—in the words of the authors—“the land of the gods.” The wealth of the soil, “flowing in milk and honey,” was repeated at length—clearly aligning western lands with Christian symbolism, and implicitly, whiteness (DeLuca and Demo 541-560). California’s vineyards, olive farms, and the state’s cultivation of nuts and citrus fruits were showcased next to cattle ranches, dairy production, and fishing. Taken together, the farming illustrations stressed the variety of produce to be gained across the state, while either rendering invisible or whitewashing the labor force required to reap these benefits. Take fig. 5 which depicts a section of the Vina Vineyard in Northern California. Part of a large ranch acquired by Leland Stanford, the vineyards pictured in the halftone reproduction show the vast extent of the property with young vines stretching out in regularly ploughed furrows toward the horizon. The standardized winegrowing operations are decoupled from the labor force, whose members are only slightly hinted at in the warehouse depiction below. Tinted in pink and adorned with painted grapes, the warehouse extends beyond the frame, visually emphasizing its massive capacity of one million gallons. The first three entrances are occupied by three men, whose attire (shirt, waistcoat, hat) suggests their overseeing function. Rather than showcasing physical effort, their presence serves to measure the considerable scale and efficiency of operations. Amid the picturesque setting, the workforce on the vines and inside the warehouse—driving the actual production of one million gallons—is invisible. Akin to Leland Stanford’s desire to connect California to a whitewashed Spanish missionary past, the vineyard is pictured as an engineering feat that could live up to European wine production in the Mediterranean, including France. The actual vine laborers—of Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous descent—did not fit the framing of viticulture as an historical symbol of “civilization” at the turn of the century, as art historian Shana Klein suggested (15-42).
Fig. 5 Vina Vineyard, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
16The picturesque agricultural iconography used throughout the album resonated with California’s “Mediterranean” underpinnings, a term historian Kevin Starr has used to trace the many turn-of-the-century depictions that likened the state’s landscapes to Italy, Greece, or Morocco. California’s European American population was accordingly singled out as more receptive to the arts and to outdoor living and working, as opposed to the more austere culture of the Puritan East Coast (365-414). This “Mediterranean” reading had a significant extractive dimension, as the state was envisioned as a readily available agricultural paradise—as Californie’s authors purported. Interestingly, these fabricated Californian visions were later transported to Morocco, whose climate and topography resemble California’s. While under French rule in the first half of the twentieth century, the country’s agricultural sector aspired to the “Californian model,” notably in standardized fruit production and packaging (Swearingen 59-77). As in the Moroccan case, the “Mediterranean” reading of California had clear, racial underpinnings and followed a visual politics of exclusion. It aligned the state with select ancient European civilizations, rather than its multiracial presence and past. Most notably, Anglo Californians attempted to erase Mexican and Californio influence and instead embraced a “Spanish fantasy heritage,” as William Deverell has demonstrated. The imagined Spanish past was particularly influential in the vast swath of tourist literature that Californian boosters released, among them Truman, author of Semi-Tropical California and co-publisher of Californie (6-8, 28).
17Similar to the rhetoric of agricultural abundance, minerals found in the western soil were framed as riches that “poured liberally from the earth.” Reaching back to the Gold Rush, the authors glorified the state’s mining businesses. Sidelining the violent displacement of Indigenous Californians after the Gold Rush and the many conflicts related to the ecological devastation of mining technologies that ensued—such as hydraulic mining which contaminated rivers, poisoned fauna, and disregarded Indigenous stewardship (Isenberg)—the album instead touted a seemingly endless array of resources. Gold or quartz mining, oil fields down south or logging operations up north were all portrayed as infinite extractive opportunities for enrichment that relied on the latest engineering technologies. In the mineral section of the Paris exhibition, the album’s extractive fantasies materialized in the shape of a specimen of crystallized gold. Transported from California and placed at the center of the US display, the golden ball provided a complementary object lesson to the visual vocabulary furnished in the album (Peck, 1901 487).
18Faithful to the cover of the album, the most prominent feature of the souvenir were the big trees. Their sheer size invited yet more reveries of resources. The third author, William Foote, then State Commissioner for Yosemite and a partner of the Southern Pacific, must have provided the expertise for this section, while the railroad’s official photographer Howard Tibbitts—the company’s link to the Camera Club—furnished most of the illustrations. The heavy reliance on sequoia imagery, as on the album cover, dates back to the first Paris world’s fair with a significant western representation in 1867, where Watkins’s photographs of giant trees were displayed in wooden frames, carved out of these very trees (Brunet and Talley). By the turn of the century, the trees were more than a mere surrogate for American grandeur. Tibbitts’s illustrations bear witness to this shift, as they integrate the constant negotiation of promoting “pristine” nature and providing access to resources. Decimating the tress to lumber—for the railroad, fence posts, or even matches—signified easy access to material wealth and mastery over the allegedly “wild” territory (Vermaas 96-114; Görgen 2025).
Fig. 6 Troop C, 4th Cavalry on Fallen Giant, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
19Visions of land ownership came in the shape of both military and leisurely illustrations (fig. 6). Tibbitts’s photograph of a cavalry rigidly lined up on the trunk of the Fallen Giant (known today as the Fallen Monarch) not only played on the longstanding iconography of western pioneers on horseback. It also gestured at the militarized conquest of the American West as the land was turned into European American territory. The cavalry itself is a case in point: prior to their service as park guardians at Yosemite, members of the Fourth Cavalry had served in the Spanish-American War. Some of the troops had equally been deployed in Utah and Arizona territory to force Utes and Apache into surrender and onto reservations in the 1880s (Keliher). Between 1890 and 1916 (the year the National Park Service was founded), the regiment managed Yosemite National Park where it placed restrictions on hitherto common hunting practices. This further limited centuries-old lifeways of members of the seven Traditionally Associated Tribes of Yosemite, including seasonal burns. Indigenous stewardship in the shape of controlled burns was rejected as careless and, to European Americans, “seemed only to demonstrate a marked inability to appreciate natural beauty” (Spence 4, 110-111). To showcase the recreational opportunities at Yosemite, the cavalry portrait in fig. 6 was framed by a panoramic view of Yosemite Valley with actress Lillie Langtry posing in elegant fashion at Overhanging Rock. Her magisterial gaze over the Valley, taken from one of the major viewing spots of the growing tourist industry, suggests easy access and—not least through Langtry —entertainment opportunities.
Fig. 7 Howard C. Tibbitts, The Overhanging Rock, c. 1900. In “The California Camera Club’s Trip to the Yosemite,” Camera Craft vol. 3, no. 2, 1901, p. 69. Retrieved from the Internet Archive, original from the San Francisco Public Library.
20The photographer magazine Camera Craft once again echoed this iconography in its outing reports (fig. 7): Tibbitts notably documented female Camera Club members casually seated at Overhanging Rock, thus rendering the scenery in dizzying heights accessible to the growing number of women interested in hiking (Pyne 60-61). To drive home the notion of collective access to Yosemite, the Cavalry portrait is followed by a group picture of more than fifty children (fig. 8). Lined up on a sequoia stump, the young westerners stand in for the next generation of successful settlers. Moving from expropriation to entertainment, the sequence illustrated the supposed ease with which trees—and the very environment with its inhabitants—could be subdued and bent to the will of European Americans.
Fig. 8 In the California Redwoods, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
21The narrative of conquest as it unfolds in the pages of Californie is emblematic of the shifting “environmental imagination” (Buell) of the American West at the turn of the century. The brochure advertised the enjoyment of western wilderness while praising the growing number of recreational opportunities, not only at Yosemite, but also at resorts in Monterey and Santa Barbara. As evidenced in the dilemma of the early environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club, the appreciation of nature for the public went hand in hand with access to those sites, with thousands of visitors entering Yosemite by the early 1900s (Hyde 74). The cooperation of the US military and the railroad paved the way for tourism on the West Coast, including at Yosemite, by carving through Indigenous lands and exploiting a predominantly Chinese workforce. While the past destruction wrought by these industries is veiled in the album, the desire for select communities to settle in, enjoy, and cultivate the landscapes is unmistakable, as fig. 5 suggests (Karuka; Görgen 2025).
- 2 By 1900, it was more common for Californian photographers to cherry-pick elements of Indigenous cul (...)
22The forward-looking vision of European American California at the world’s fair in 1900 is a direct outgrowth of the events of the last decade of the nineteenth century. After the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago three years later, where Frederick Jackson Turner declared the “frontier” closed, ideas of Indigenous America shifted in the European American imagination. The previous Paris fair in 1889 had featured a Buffalo Bill Wild West show with more than 100 Indigenous performers, alongside dozens of bison and horses expressly shipped to France. These performances were absent in Paris in 1900. The Indigenous “enactment of their own defeat” in the spectacles, as Emily Burns has demonstrated, spoke to both American and European audiences whose nations had attained their own imperial frontiers. While the Wild West was omnipresent in the souvenir publications of the 1889 fair, the cowboy-and-Indian nostalgia was not restaged for California in 1900 (14-15, 19-21). As the Indigenous hold on the land had been systematically undermined, through one-sided treaties, massacres, and colonization, ideas of Indianness were gradually re-appropriated in an easily consumable fashion in late-nineteenth-century visual culture, as in Edward Curtis’s photographs of “vanishing” and yet celebrated “forefathers” (Trachtenberg xxii-xxiii). This highly selective iconography was mostly dislocated from California, whose Indigenous population had diminished by 90 % over the course of the California genocide and Spanish colonization, and many of those who persisted lived in extreme poverty (see Madley). While Californian photographers, such as C. C. Pierce and George Wharton James, occasionally photographed Southern California’s Indigenous populations—for example the Chemehuevi in the Mojave Desert—proportionately few pictures of California Natives are present in the promotional iconography. Instead, significant portions of the output cover the Spanish missions and would be mobilized for romanticized narratives of Spanish California that veiled the brutal history of enslavement and expropriation in the missions.2 Californie was no exception as its account concludes with a brief reference to Spanish California as “the days when the Cross of Christianity was planted in the land and […] brought the newfound world under the banner of civilization.” In the souvenir album, the state’s Indigenous present and past were thus erased. Instead, the authors proclaimed the territory both easily accessible and up for grabs for future settlers. Next to translations into French and German, the album made explicit mention of French, German-, Swiss-, and Italian-speaking communities in the state, clearly designating the western European settlers the editors found desirable.
23Photographic circulation on multiple supports and across a variety of distribution channels cemented this narrative, allowing international as well as local populations to internalize it (Edwards 322-326). What added to the veracity of the Californie story were exactly these images, as authors insisted throughout that the halftone illustrations were made from “real images” and by Californians themselves. Halftones reproduced photographic images by breaking them down into dot patterns that captured subtle shading and texture, resulting in lifelike images that closely resembled the originals. At the turn of the century, when the truth value of engravings was increasingly questioned in the press, the halftone process added authenticity to such stories (Trotti). The Consul General of France, lending credence to the American claims in the afterword of the album, furthermore confirmed “the accuracy of the information on the wealth and industries of the State of California.”
Fig. 9 Siège de l’administration et bureaux de la Commission Californienne, in E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman, W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Author’s collection.
24Given the grandiose rhetoric that publishers embraced in the album, it is worthwhile to trace the impact and public reception of the world’s fair efforts, especially as California was the only US state to produce such an album. For a proper representation in France, the exhibition committee invested considerable sums. Some $3,000 were spent on the production of the album—almost $100,000 in today’s money—and double the amount on detailed maps of the state (The Journal of the Assembly 522). The album was on sale at the Californian office on Place de l’Opéra, within walking distance from the fair’s attractions. In a report to Governor Henry T. Gage, publishers Runyon and Foote identified the office as the main venue for French-American communication, with an American flag flying over the office roof (fig. 9). The album celebrated these transatlantic ties in an allegorical depiction of Marianne and Columbia by San Francisco illustrators Saalburg and Briggs. Equipped with the seal of the state, Columbia hands the pages of Californie to Marianne as a gesture of education, perhaps even enlightenment, provided by America. Similar to the illustration, publishers Runyon and Foote claimed that the California offices drew “thousands of visitors of all nationalities seeking information on the resources of our state,” to the point that California had become “a household word” for Parisians and visitors alike (110). The San Franciscan press touted a similar narrative, declaring upon return of the Southern Pacific agent William Mills that “[n]o more enthusiastic Californian has ever returned to the state” (“Wm. H. Mills at Home,” 2).
25Upon closer inspection, however, government reports indicate that the number of visitors at the offices on Place de l’Opéra was closer to 30 per day, not dozens or even hundreds (The Journal of the Assembly 521). It also turns out that the much-vaunted Californian presence appears only rarely—and certainly no more than other attractions—in exposition reports. If anything, both French and international publics were “amused” by the American displays on the Seine, as Hélène Trocmé has shown, with visitors commenting on the “odd and undistinguished manners” of Americans, their permanent desire “to do business,” as well as their “Puritan rigidity” reflected in the Sunday closure of the US pavilion (39). Despite these bemusing anecdotes, the fair still strengthened French-American relations, a development which was considered particularly meaningful in the wake of major tensions between the two countries, caused by France’s siding with Spain in the recent Spanish-American War as well as US criticism of the Dreyfus affair. At a ceremony with French president Emile Loubé and the US ambassador, both nations reunited in a gesture of friendship, as Americans unveiled a statue of Lafayette in front of the Louvre, donated by the Daughters of the American Revolution among others (Trocmé 36-37, 39-40). The back of the Californie brochure struck a similar chord in depicting the “sister republics” (Higonnet) with the stars-and-stripes and the tricolore flag united in the cause of liberty.
26How can California’s impact in Paris be measured? The one-sided reports from the state commissioners make it nearly impossible to trace the concrete influence this kind of promotion would have had on visitors and their desire to visit, or even settle, in California. The most enduring impact of the Californian exhibits, as shown in exhibition reports, came from the state’s diverse resources. In the forestry building, near the Eiffel Tower, Californians displayed seventy-two specimens of trees for which exhibitors received the “unanimous grand prix.” Reports stated that this success was all the more remarkable since “the State most distant from Paris” best represented US industries (Peck, 1901 359-361). The ostentatious display of resources extracted from the Californian earth did not, however, incite an actual desire on the part of European, and particularly French publics, to emigrate. While the album did include an itemized list on the supposedly cheap cost of living in California, French immigration to the United States remained low, as France saw its industries and cities growing over the course of the nineteenth century, creating less acute need to relocate across the Atlantic (Haines 77-78). Despite the massive advertisement—in photographs, maps, and tasting opportunities—the Paris-San Francisco route remained a logistical and financial challenge, for visitors and migrants. In 1900, the trip would still take at least two to four weeks, via steamship across the Atlantic and the transcontinental railroad from New York to Chicago, across the Plains and the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco (Foucrier 279). The same was true for the return route: so arduous was the trip to Europe that some American travelers even went as far as comparing the Atlantic voyage to traversing an open prairie, equating travel to France to migration to the American West—as if it were another territory to conquer (Burns 146-148).
27Ultimately, the making, distribution, and reception of Californie is emblematic of a form of circulation that François Brunet called “circularity,” in other words, an artistic object “returns ‘transformed’ [...] to the place from which it came” (13). For the photographers and investors who participated in it, the souvenir album represented both an object and a projection screen. Knowing that the album would be displayed, leafed through, its contents viewed and recounted in Paris, the producers imbued it with their visions of imperialist California. Despite the fact that Californians eventually exerted little impact on the French public, the mere fact of circulation—that the album traveled from the West Coast to the French capital and back—gave it material and symbolic value. This value, gained through circulation, fueled the Californian imagination by implying that even in Paris, there could be prospective settlers interested in relocating to California. Such reveries of international acclaim, repeated in grandiose vocabulary time and again in magazines, made the residents’ own location all the more desirable.
28Not unlike the California exhibition committee, which feared the state would be overshadowed by sub-classifications on the fairgrounds, the album’s creators were keenly aware of the ongoing effort to shape distinct regional identities through transatlantic photographic circulation. Californian boosters, however, were not the only ones to seize this opportunity in Paris. How might the state’s souvenir album compare to other regional exhibitions on view in the French capital in 1900? Think for example of W.E.B. DuBois’ meticulous infographics on the state of Georgia in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” that demonstrated African American progress despite the lasting effects of slavery and segregation; or, consider Frances Benjamin Johnston and Zaida Ben-Yusuf’s collection of American women photographers on view for wider publics for the first time at the Paris fair. As opposed to these exhibitors (see Rusert and Battle-Baptiste; Griffith), the photographers and publishers of Californie adopted a different approach: they circulated a narrative of supposed progress with deeply ingrained erasures. The souvenir album fashioned a European American narrative of the state, driven as much by extractive fantasies as by a desire for colonial settlement. The display of this new visual vocabulary in Paris—at the same time as the United States expanded toward the Pacific—was intended to strengthen a forward-looking vision of the nation. Through transatlantic circulation and through the veracity claims of the photographic medium articulated in the album, Californie facilitated the fabrication and consolidation of a European American Californian culture. The very format of the reproducible promotional album transported an imperial vision of the western state back to its own residents, thus shaping local understandings of California’s place in the European world.