Join us for an engaging book talk with Carolin Görgen. This talk examines the history and cultural significance of the California Camera Club, a San Francisco–based photographic association that emerged as the largest organization of its kind in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. In her new book, Carolin Görgen retraces the forgotten history of this group, its members—both women and men—and their crucial contribution to shaping the cultural imagination of California and the American West as a photographic territory. Although the club played a decisive role in advancing the careers of Ansel Adams and other “big names” of American photography, its most significant legacy lies in fostering collaborative outdoor practices. In telling the story of these largely unknown photographers, the book offers a new perspective on American photography and its collective dimension.

Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne Université and a 2025 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. A historian of photography and the American West, she is the author of The California Camera Club: Collective Visions in the Making of the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025). Her research focuses on historical photo networks in the western United States and their environmental afterlives. Görgen’s research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Huntington Library, and the Thomas Mann House, among others. In France, she serves on the editorial board of the journal Photographica.