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SIDEBAR TO AA LEAD: CALIFORNIA PHOTOGRAPHY

(with cuts)

OAKLAND, CALIF. - "Silver & Gold: Cased Images of the California Gold Rush"

presents the first major world event to be documented through photography. One

hundred and fifty daguerreotypes and ambrotypes made between 1848 and 1860 are

assembled in the exhibition continuing through July 26.

Photography was barely ten years old when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill

on January 24, 1848. The rush of fortune seekers that descended onto

California brought with it many daguerreotype practitioners, making this

remarkable world event the first to be documented photographically. This

assemblage of photographs bears silent witness to the lives of all the people

of diverse races and backgrounds who found their way to California during the

turbulent period known as the Gold Rush. The daguerreotypes and ambrotypes -

called "cased images" because they were set in ornate cases of leather, velvet

and brass - portray an unparalleled visual legacy that offers crucial and

often intensely personal and touching details about the people and the places

of the California Gold Rush.

The Oakland Museum of California's extensive collection includes the finest

known cased images of the era. Private and institutional collections across

the country contributed additional invaluable pieces for this exhibit, many of

which have never been previously exhibited or published.

"Silver & Gold: Cased Images of the California Gold Rush" includes works by

Frederick Coombs, W.H. Rulofson, Seth Louis Shaw, William Shew, Isaac Wallace

Baker and Robert H. Vance. Through their eyes, and the eyes of their cameras,

we see history in the making - images of California as it was before, during

and after "the world rushed in."

The exhibition begins with images of Native Californians and continues with

portraits of those who shared the land with them - the Spanish and Mexican

Californios, like Andreas Pico and Mariano Vallejo, whose forebears first

arrived in the Eighteenth Century. Other daguerreotypes portray the Boston

seaport, a point of departure for the months-long sea route to California, and

the bustling port of San Francisco.

Images from the gold fields reflect the miners' rough houses, sunburned faces

and makeshift clothes, and often capture a sense of the loneliness, isolation

and determination of men working under difficult conditions far from home.

Behind them, one can sometimes see the gouged and eroded hillsides that were

the sad byproduct of new technologies and hydraulic mining techniques.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 200-page book published

by the University of Iowa Press. It includes essays by John Wood, author, poet

and founding president of the Daguerreian Society; Peter Palmquist, author,

independent scholar and curator in the field of photography; and co-curators

of the exhibit Marcia Eymann, history department curator of photography and

Drew Johnson, Oakland Museum art department curator of photography.

"Silver & Gold" will travel to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum

of American Art in Washington, D.C. (October 30, 1998 to March 7, 1999) and to

the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento (August 13 to October 10, 1999).