May 21
Charles Leander Weed Ashore in the Silver Pacific
This talk is part of the Edwin L. Weisl Lectureship in the Arts sponsored by the Robert Lehman Foundation
Charles Leander Weed was the embodiment of a Silver Pacific photographer. He was a skilled operator (best known for making the first photographs of Yosemite) working in an elegant San Francisco studio until his boss deployed him to open a photographic studio in another Pacific port city, Hong Kong. Weed took with him the practices he developed among California’s mining elite there and onto subsequent voyages to Hawai’i and Yokohama. His photographs of community members and ports demonstrate a complex negotiation of sovereignty, both in regards to his purported subjects, and the photographs themselves.
Monica Bravo is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of photography and the modern art of the Americas.
from Art & Art History