Picturing California's Other Landscape: The Great Central Valley

This lavish, oversized, full-color book features 150 years of paintings, photographs, tourist and advertising art, and maps that depict California's Great Central Valley. Through text and images, Picturing California's Other Landscape examines the portrayal of the Central Valley over the last 150 years: as promised land, exploitable resource, paradise lost, a source of unexpected life and beauty.

Picturing California's Other Landscape is filled with works by world-renowned artists including Albert Bierstadt, William Hahn, William Keith, Maynard Dixon, Frank LaPena, Wayne Thiebaud, Ansel Adams, Robert Dawson, Dorothea Lange, Carleton Watkins, and others--however, it is far more than a beautiful art book. Using the region as a backdrop, essays by Central Valley scholars explore more general questions about art: whether photography depicts "real" landscapes or invents them; who creates art and for what purpose; how does artistic enterprise--or lack of it--shape the way in which people see their own environment.

Picturing California's Other Landscape will supplement a groundbreaking show of these paintings and other graphics at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California (OctoberDecember 1999).