For Californians, the construction of the Panama Canal was directly linked to the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire which would culminate in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. Once the city rebuilt and the canal completed, San Francisco became the geo-strategic location par excellence for an American nation in the midst of imperialist expansion. Photography played a central role in this new geo-political imagination of U.S. empire as it was closely tied to the environmental imagination of the American West—as were the two (re-)construction projects of the city and the canal. This paper traces how the intimate links between Californian photography, massive environmental transformation, and imperial desire coalesced in the run-up to canal completion in Panama and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
Carolin Görgen (Thu,) studied this question.