“I See Beauty in this Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California"

“I See Beauty in this Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California,” a five-month exhibition that features approximately 150 photographs, is a combination of large-scale color prints by writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton and her selections from the California Historical Society’s vast photography collections. The exhibit showcases material dating from the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century -- much of which has never been exhibited before. Hamilton has selected images that… Show more are not predictable views of pastoral windmills or heroic mule teams, but rather images that reflect her own keen interest in revealing the unexpected.

The exhibition is part of The California Historical Society’s Curating California program through which artists, writers, historians, poets, activists, and other remarkable Californians are invited to explore the rich collections of the Historical Society with the goal of inspiring a project or exhibition. Hamilton, the first to be featured as part of Curating California, has over the past two years been telling the stories of California’s rural communities in her multimedia work Real Rural. Hamilton has delved into the collections of the California Historical Society to connect these present-day stories with the past to create I See Beauty in This Life.

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