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Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the nineteenth century. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco explores the significance of that revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush and the hub of Pacific migration and trade. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which to navigate the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that had divided groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader national transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and visitors, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative. |
