Richard White - California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History

Selected books by

RICHARD WHITE

THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS

The United States during the Gilded Age and Reconstruction

RAILROADED

The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

REMEMBERING AHANAGRAN

Storytelling in a Familys Past

THE ORGANIC MACHINE

The Remaking of the Columbia River

THE MIDDLE GROUND

Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815

ITS YOUR MISFORTUNE AND NONE OF MY OWN

A New History of the American West

THE ROOTS OF DEPENDENCY

Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos

LAND USE, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

The Shaping of Island County, Washington, 17901940

CALIFORNIA
EXPOSURES

ENVISIONING MYTH AND HISTORY

RICHARD WHITE

Photographs by

JESSE AMBLE WHITE

Cartography by

ERIK STEINER

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

To Sofia,
who reminds her grandfather to look to the future.
And to the memory of Floyd ONeil, a man of the West and a
scholar of the West. We will not see his like again.

An old oak in a new orchard, Kings County

T his book is a collaboration between a historian and a photographer who happen to be father and son. Relations between the present and past are fraught, but so too are relations between fathers and sons. We do not necessarily agree on the work a photograph can do. Jesse White has no illusions that his photographs are simple slices of reality. He selects, he frames, he alters, and he reacts. He regards a photograph as an artifact of a moment, a captured slice of time that was different before the now often metaphorical shutter clicked and will change again the second after it clicked.

I do not deny that this is true, but I also think, as I will explain, that every photograph reveals a history because every element in the frame existed before the photographoften long before the photograph. Starting from a photograph, I can tell a story of a place by attaching the elements of the photographtrees, buildings, land, animals, roads, levees, and moreto documents in archives, books, other photographs, maps, and memories. Our work focuses on three places, with remnants of a fourth. In moving back and forth from place to place, I use the photographs to tell stories. When I stitch the stories together, the result is a montage that is also a historya peculiar and very partial historyof California.

D Ranch on Point Reyes, the Tulare Lake Basin, and the lands of the cojoined San Gabriel and San Fernando missions are not the usual vantage points for writing a history of California. None of them, except perhaps the missions, are iconic; but all of them are revealing. As I deciphered the photographs, I began to realize that they are like tree rings in that big events and trends have left traces on them.

It is easiest to define the book by what it is not. It is not a photography book, although the photographs are at its center and without them there would be no book. It is not an art history book, which would focus more narrowly on the photographs themselves and on the photographer. Nor is it a conventional history, for in no histories that I know does the narration proceed from the photographs. Usually, photographs illustrate the historical text. They are decorative.

The book can be read as a collage, but I intend the collage to function like the frames of a graphic novel whose illustrations are an intrinsic part of the narrative. I would like to claim R. Crumbs Short History of America as an inspiration, but I cannot since I looked at it carefully only when this book was nearly complete, though I claim it as an analogy.

I put photographs at the center because I am pursuing a particular way of looking and seeing. I want to see the past in the present. I do not mean in museums, although Jesse took some of the photographs in museums. I do not mean at historical sites or in archives, although Jesse has photographed historical sites, and I have spent considerable time in archives. I mean seeing the past in plain sight, in the quotidian places where we live, work, and travel. People cannot recognize the importance of the past, and of history, if they cannot even see it and recognize how pervasive it is.

If this sounds like proselytizing, then so be it. I have spent my adult life teaching and writing about history in ways that now often seem quixotic. History has become less and less important in the schools and in public discourse and public policy. It seems irrelevant to daily life even as I cannot imagine daily life without it. We ignore at our peril the dead who walk among us, jostle us, constrain us, and enable us.

Traces of the dead surround us. The dead have made things, broken things, planted things, and killed things. The sum total of their actions and thoughts, along with what we have added and what nature has provided, constitutes our world. Our societies, economies, politics, and cultures are composed mostly of what the dead have done. We, like our world, are their progeny. Subtract the works of the dead, and the world would be diminished and unrecognizable. This is why history matters. Without history, we are strangers in a strange land, never understanding what we are seeing and unable to grasp how it came to be there.

In everyday life, the past remains visible. It not only can be photographed, but virtually every photograph of our contemporary world is a historical photograph.

Why? The photographers arrangement of the elements of the past, as Jesse insists, might be of the moment and vanish the instant it is captured, but the elements themselves endure for varying amounts of time. These elements are fragments of once-more-complete pasts. They lead away from their present configuration and into the past, into earlier and different configurations.

But if the past is everywhere in our lives, why not just look around? Why do we need photographs? We need them because photographs allow us to concentrate. They corral our attention away from the flux of vision that is always rushing us on to the next scene. This book is an extended exercise in expanding a lived experience and recovering context.

The lived experience, more unconventionally, includes my own. This is not the first time I have encountered many of the places in this book. History is just one way that humans approach the past; memory is another. The personal does not belong in all histories, but I think it belongs in this one.

I have several techniques, not wholly compatible, for using photographs. Some are more elliptical than others. I excavate, I dismember, and I associate. What I do with the photograph determines how a chapter unfolds. When I excavate, I usually concentrate on digging down into a particular place. In others I follow the references I find in the image; I can move far from the site of a given photograph. Just as Jesse sometimes employed a drone to take a photograph, sometimes my views can hover above the photographs subject as I seek a panoramic view. The result is that the chapters, like the photographs, are not all of a kind. The asymmetry arises from the technique.

The premise of my excavation is that a modern photograph represents the temporal top layer of a sedimentary construction that extends below it. I am engaging in a kind of historical archaeology without the shovels. Going through the sediments yields a history. The logic is spatial, and the goal is to recover what was on the site of the photograph at various times in the past. For this I often use old maps as well as old photographs and contemporary descriptions.