Centennial Harvest #picsoritdidnthappen

The 250th birthday of the United States spurred me to look back at the 100th birthday, 1876, here in Sonoma County. The years following the Civil War were a time of rapid expansion, with the freshly-incorporated cities of Healdsburg, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa just beginning alongside quick-growing communities like Sebastopol or the mining town of Mercuryville. The west had just been connected to the east via the Transcontinental Railway.

Inspired by a "A Brief History" of "Sonoma County and its Possibilities" in a book published by the Press Democrat around the turn of the 20th century, I chose to repurpose their scrapbook format.

A problem shared by all photographs is that their realistic appearance can easily erase the memories and truths involved in the "real" situation of making of those photos. Photographic truth is narrow. Photos are by their physics incomplete. You can only aim the camera lens in one direction, and open the shutter only for a brief time. What is shown in the resulting photo becomes permanent, and what is cropped-out becomes forgotten, effectively erased.

About 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad's Transcontinental railway workforce were Chinese – but you won’t see them in famous photos of the “Golden Spike.” Similarly, of the thousands of Chinese men who created Napa and Sonoma County’s roads, wineries, country side walls and mines in the 1870s, few images remain. Sonoman news accounts rarely even cited names other than “John Chinaman” when reporting deaths or violence against them.

Today, their achievements still surround us. But those workers are only ghosts, driven off as “undesirable immigrants" by politicians like President Grant and Governor Irwin and harassed by newly-arrived easterners moving to the region.

Few heirlooms have survived, because there were few heirs. Chinese women were barred from entering the US in 1875, and California's Chinese population collapsed, as the majority of the male workforce couldn’t create Chinese American families. None of Sonoma's thousands of original Chinese settlers remained.

“Centennial Harvest” imagines some of these lost memories and opportunities. Historical photos were mixed with hundreds of carefully-crafted synthetic images, then sent across the internet to be picked by anonymized Chinese laborers in a modern analog to those unnamed grape pickers of the 19th century.

In the piece from this project for Art Trails at SebArts Gallery, the central portrait, created in a studio style typical for sitters of the era, is printed on thin handmade bamboo-based paper so that it faintly reveals the centennial map of Santa Rosa behind it, and the paper is further faintly treated with sandalwood sticks, whose precise burning used to be employed to mark the passage of time for the everyday events of a now-lost American future.

More about this continuing Sonoma County Art Trails 2026 project forthcoming. Please visit my studio in downtown Petaluma during the tour weekends, October 10/11 and 17/18.