BIO
Carolin Görgen

Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne University (Paris, France). She obtained her doctorate from the joint PhD program of the University Paris-Diderot and the École du Louvre, with a thesis on the California Camera Club. She is currently working on the manuscript for publication. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Huntington Library, and the Beinecke Library at Yale. Since 2016, she is the co-organizer of the seminar Camera Memoria at Paris-Diderot that focuses on histories of photography from the English-speaking world.

PROJECT
The Foundation of the California Camera Club, 1890-1900: The Onset of a Northern Californian Photographic Exchange Network
2019

Thanks to the Peter Palmquist Memorial Fund, I was able to gather photographic sources dispersed across archives and museums in the Bay Area. Over the course of three weeks, I consulted materials at the Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, and Stanford University Special Collections. The sources included photographic prints, albums, lantern slides, and correspondence. Many of them covered the early history of the California Camera Club and its most active members who were based in San Francisco in the 1890s. I was particularly drawn to a scrapbook by club librarian Gustav Eisen, who documented Club meetings and his own photographic work in an impressive album, assembling newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and illustrations from early twentieth-century magazines.

Scrapbook on Eisen, Bolander and McLean families, 1873-1940; MS OV 5048; California Historical Society.

This scrapbook from the CHS documents typical activities of a camera club member – including a newspaper announcement of a group exhibition in San Francisco, a reproduction from a photography magazine and handwritten notes on upcoming projects.

During my stay in the Bay Area, I met with curators of the Legion of Honor Museum who are preparing an exhibition on San Francisco photographer Arnold Genthe in 2021. I will be contributing an essay. I also met with an editor from the University of California Press to discuss my publication project. I closed my travels with a talk at the library of the California Historical Society on my dissertational work. In the long term, the sources I gathered during this stay will help me transform my dissertation into a book manuscript.

For researchers based in Europe, the Palmquist grant is an extremely useful and valuable experience to explore photographic archives on site and establish contact with American researchers.

Interfaces article: Everyday Photography? Politicizing a ‘vernacular’ photo album of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906

Talk at Institut Pour La Photographie: 19th century photography collections