Dunes, 3 (negative), Oceano Dunes ©Lana Z Caplan 2023

Lana Z Caplan’s project Oceano (for seven generations) tells the story of the Oceano Dunes through the dunes’ successive inhabitants, while interrogating photographic history and convention.

Co-constructed, performative portraits contrast the historic inhabitants – the Indigenous yak tit^yu tit^yu yak tiłhini (ytt) Northern Chumash Tribe, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 ancient Egyptian film set, the Modernists, and a colony of depression-era artist and mystic squatters – with the current ATV riding community that is the source of a public health crisis for neighboring communities. Black and white landscape images that resemble Weston’s are flipped into negatives, confusing the notion of photographic truth and challenging the male-dominated history of the genre.

This landscape is not the utopian, mythological, American West landscape of the Modernists. Yet this is, more profoundly a landscape of stolen territory, exploited and extracted resources, homeless encampments, and a habitat in ecological peril. Through photographs, video and text, Oceano (for seven generations) ultimately aims to question legacies of colonization, media history, and the politics of land use – charging this cultural landscape with significance far beyond the Oceano Dunes.

*The subtitle for the book for seven generations comes from a phrase used by Lorie Lathrop Laguna, ytt Northern Chumash Tribe, in a phone conversation with Caplan― “Our decisions are made while thinking seven generations into the future”. The Seventh Generation Principle is believed to date back to the twelfth century Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

"Abel, Oceano Dunes SVRA, 2022" / © Lana Z Caplan from the book Oceano published by Kehrer Verlag

Continue reading...

Listen to an interview with Lana about her project

Harvey Milk Photo Center Press Release

The Complication of Good Questions – Review of “Oceano (for seven generations)” by Lana Z Caplan