“The View from Here,” featuring 275 pictures from SFMOMA’s 16,000-image collection, surveys the state’s photographic tradition from the 1840s to the present. And what a magnificent landscape it was, seducing the rest of the country with the promise of unlimited resources, reinvention and opportunities to amass a fortune - beliefs that persist to this day.
But it was the photographs of California’s sweeping vistas, gigantic redwoods, ominous mountain peaks and grand Pacific coast that beckoned to the wider world. The Gold Rush spurred a stampede to the Sierra foothills in the mid-1800s.
