‘California Time’

Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University. Institute for the Humanities Visiting Fellow Lecture.

Lecture abstract: “Landscapes as the eye takes them in seem relentlessly set in the present, but they actually mingle the past, the present, and a potential future.  Photographs capture the temporal simultaneity of past, present, and, if not the future, our ambitions for it. These images are palimpsests; they need to be unpacked.  Each picture demands a thousand words, and to create a history from photographs involves a conjunction of image and story.  I am after what is immediately visible in these places but also the ghosts that inhabit these photographs and the directions in which they gesture.”