Westward Ho! Event Will Show Santa Monica the 'Far West'

It’s tough to imagine Santa Monica as so remote that it was rarely photographed.

Images of the pier at sunset, brides in billowy white dresses outside luxury seaside hotels and jean-clad celebrity moms shopping with babies on their hips dominate Santa Monica Twitter feeds.

But in the 19th Century, Santa Monica was known as the "Far West."

The first images of the Pacific Ocean and the coast were taken by just a few photographers and depict an untouched landscaped. Some of these earliest landscape photographs of Santa Monica will be displayed during a special presentation July 17 in the Main Library, titled "Westward Ho! Visualizing the Frontier in Santa Monica."

The presentation will be delivered by Shana Klein, a Santa Monica native and doctoral candidate in art history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who promises to give political and artistic context to the mid-19th century photography to show an overall pictures of Santa Monica "as part of the ancient, unchanging wilderness" of the American West.

Her illustrated talk draws upon research she conducted in the Santa Monica Public Library’s Image Archives and the Santa Monica History Museum.

The presentation is 7 p.m. July 17 in the ’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, 601 Santa Monica Blvd.

Klein will be an Andrew Wyeth fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in the fall.