Events | "Californie 1900: Circulating California’s environmental imagination at the Paris world’s fair" - Lecture by Carolin Görgen

UCLA, ELTS Department | September 27, 2023 | 12:00 PM (PDT)

Join 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow & photo historian Carolin Görgen at UCLA’s Department for European Languages and Transcultural Studies for a lecture on how California presented itself at the Paris’ World’s Fair in 1900.

© E.W. Runyon, B.C. Truman & W.W. Foote, Californie. Illustration pour l’Exposition de Paris, San Francisco: California Paris Exposition Commission, 1900. Bibliothèque Nationale de Franc
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.

Participants

© privat

Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne Université, Paris. After studying American Studies and Art History in the Netherlands, the US, and France, she obtained her PhD from the University Paris-Diderot and the Ecole du Louvre in 2018. Her research focuses on the photographic history of California and the American West. Her work has received support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Huntington Library, and the Amon Carter Museum. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Photographica. Among many other publications, Görgen is the author of the 2021 article “Californian Women Photographers in the U.S. Archival Landscape: Toward a More Inclusive History of American Photography.” She is a 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Attendance Information:

Link to RSVP here.

Location:

University of California, Los Angeles

Royce Hall 236

10745 Dickson Ct,

Los Angeles, CA 90095

Attendance to this event is free and open to the public.

This lecture is hosted by UCLA's Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies in collaboration with the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.
 

Go back