James van der Zee Mrs Turner, Lenox, Massachusetts 1905 gelatin silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Anonymous Photographer Clarence H. White and Jean Reynolds ca. 1906 cyanotype Princeton University Art Museum |
F. Holland Day Portrait of photographer Clarence H. White ca. 1906 platinum print Princeton University Art Museum |
F. Holland Day Youth with Staff 1906 platinum print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
Louis Fleckenstein Florence 1906 gum bichromate print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Sidney Carter The Sisters ca. 1906 albumen print Princeton University Art Museum |
Edward Steichen Portraits, Evening 1906 photogravure Minneapolis Institute of Art |
Edward Steichen Rodin's Balzac by Moonlight 1908 gum bichromate print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
Alphonse Mucha Tragédie ca. 1908 gelatin silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Alphonse Mucha Compositional Study of Draped Models ca. 1910 gelatin silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
A. Horsley Hinton Landscape 1908 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
Louis Lumière Tea Room at Brides-les-Bain, Savoy ca. 1907 autochrome Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
Clarence H. White Portrait of Mrs Harrington Mann 1908 photogravure Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
Frank Eugene Kitty Stieglitz in a Field with Blue Flowers 1907 autochrome Art Institute of Chicago |
Eugène Atget Interior, rue Montaigne, Paris 1910 albumen print Princeton University Art Museum |
Eugène Atget Masque Antique 1910 albumen silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
from Lines Written Near San Francisco
Every night, at the end of America
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.
How sad it is, the end of America!
While we were waiting for the land
They'd finished it – with gas drums
On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys
Where lives are mean and wretched.
But the banks thrive and the realtors
Rejoice – they have their America.
Still, there is something unsettled in the air.
Out there on the Pacific
There's no America but the Marines.
Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.
Though mad Columbus follows the sun
Into the sea, we cannot follow.
We must remain, to serve the returning sun,
And to set tables for death.
For we are the colonists of Death –
Not, as some think, of the English.
And we are preparing thrones for him to sit,
Poems to read, and beds
In which it may please him to rest.
This is the land
The pioneers looked for, shading their eyes
Against the sun – a murmur of serious life.
– Louis Simpson (At the End of the Open Road, 1963)