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

There are a great many photo books that celebrate community.

It really doesn’t matter how you define it. It could be a neighborhood community. It could be an ethnic community. It could be a cultural community. It could be a community of shared avocation. These books shed light upon the nuances of those who hold a common membership.

At the same time, there are many photo books that have a thesis for forwarding an argument. These books are for this or against that. They indict a bad practice or laud something good.


“Oceano (for seven generations)” by Lana Z Caplan
Published by Kehrer Verlah Heidelberg, 2023
Review by W. Scott Olsen


What is a bit more rare is the photo book that both celebrates community and brings together communities which disagree, without taking a side. To put the images of people who share one community, let’s say a landscape, but disagree in their understandings and arguments for what that land means, near each other, with equal empathy for every side, is a kind of examination, a kind of revelation of evidence that allows the viewer to wrestle with the complexities of the issues these communities are facing.

We have heard 1000 times, in 1000 different contexts, that answers don’t matter nearly as much as good questions. Oceano (for seven generations) by Lana Caplan is a book that, through images, articulates a system of values, a system of environmental morals within communities that contradict each other while sharing a landscape. 

It would be easy, with a lens, to favor one community and un-favor another. And yet, Caplan gives an honest voicing to every point of view. Her images of ATV riders, of Dunites, of people visiting the dunes for whatever reason, allow everyone their own integrity. When placed all together, the series makes for a challenging conversation.

Dust Circles, Oceano Dunes SVRA, 2018
© Lana Z Caplan / from the book Oceano published by Kehrer Verlag

There is a small quote at the beginning of the book.

“The Oceano dunes are in tiłhini, the place of the full moon, the traditional unceded land of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribe.”

Opposite this quote, a black and white, deeply compelling image of dunes, ripples in the sand and rock. The next image is an overturned cart and yellow caution tape marking off an area of sand. Then come the ATV riders. What we learn very early in this book is that the dunes are a complicated place, and this is a complicated book. Communities have claimed the dunes as their own, if not in property ownership, at least in terms of identity and expression, for a very long time. The Chumash lived there for 10,000 years before the Spanish arrived. An artists’ colony, including people like John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair—who came to be called The Dunites—was there. Cecil B.

DeMille’s The 10 Commandments was shot (in part) there. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams photographed there. The official name now is Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area.

Dunes, 3 (negative), 2020
© Lana Z Caplan / from the book Oceano published by Kehrer Verlag

An introduction by Hannah Rose Shell, professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for Media Arts, called “Vanishing and Morality in the Dunes,” recounts the site’s history as well as her own visits, including the discovery of a broken ATV headlight.

Is the headlight shard a future relic in waiting? At Oceano, and in Caplan’s work, we are confronted by the ambivalent relationship between and among human, historical, and natural temporalities, as well as diverse systems of morality and notions of community.

Throughout the book, there are pages that collect small quotes, most just a brief paragraph long. For example, one by Elwood Decker in November 1944 to soldier and former Dunite Howard Bradford reads,

The storm…creaked so high I had to take off my pants and roll up the rest of my clothes to pass…caught in a cold rain driven right through heavy jacket and sweater on the way home. Took hour or so to warm up…even with blazing fire…but Oh Boy the glorious color after the storm!

There are transcripts of city council meetings, people for and against the riders and their relationship to the landscape, and more.

Matthew Goldman, yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe, Oceano Dunes, 2023
© Lana Z Caplan / from the book Oceano published by Kehrer Verlag

I admit I expected the book to be simpler. I had expected an argument, a bit of anger, the standard and justified environmental call to action.

But this book is much more complicated than that, and much more rewarding. It allows the juxtaposition of ATV riders taking pride in what they are doing with the landscape with traditional communities, and the values embedded there. The book has contemporary relevance, because of court battles regarding the dangerous health effects of the dust kicked up.

The book has a subtitle: “for seven generations.”  This comes from the Chumash tribal philosophy that decisions made about the land are decisions made for the next seven generations. This is a marvelous idea, a profound sense of responsibility and stewardship.

But the book is not an argument for either side. As Caplan has said in another context, “I’ve tried to be really open-minded and kind to everyone who’s using this land or has an opinion. It was important for me not to have a strong voice advocating for one thing or another because it would do a disservice to the complexities of the issue.”

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

Therein lies the real genius and the artistic sophistication of this book. The images reveal a deep understanding and knowledge of each community, and bringing them together in the pages—a portrait of a red-shirted rider on a green motorcycle spraying sand at night as sympathetically portrayed as a pristine landscape or a father carrying his son playfully on his back—makes us wrestle with our own values.

At the end of the book, in her artist statement, Caplan explains how this project came to be.

Coming from Brooklyn, I had never lived anywhere like San Luis Obispo. It was 2016 and I settled for my new job in the boutiquey café-lined university town center. Just outside the downtown there were rolling hills with cattle and vineyards, Trump campaign signs in front yards, and lots of pickup trucks in shopping plaza parking lots. On my first day of teaching, I found myself parked next to a field of sheep. I was unmoored…Seeking my footing, I set out to find a place were I had something to grasp.

What she did was drive to the dunes where Edward Weston made his images, and what she found was something completely different.

Yet this is, more profoundly, a landscape of stolen territory, failed utopian ideals, exploited and extracted resources, homeless encampments, and destroyed habitat—with each subsequent inhabitant laying claim to the sand as their own. These are the histories underneath the familiar tranquil dune images that all came to the surface for me.

She continues:

While making the images for this project, I spent considerable time on the sand with the riders who were kind to me with their time and resources. In the massive camping and riding village, I encountered family reunions, weddings, generations of summer vacation traditions, and families bonding through tinkering with motors while cooking over campfires…My seven year journey of researching, collaborating with the community of Oceano, working with ytt Northern Chumash Tribal leadership, and countless days on the sand became a collection of stories from the Oceano Dunes that aims to destabilize the mythology of photography of the land, of the west, of California. It offers both an interrogation of photographic conventions regarding landscape and representation, and a feminist response to the standard masculine vision of landscape…Assembling these images and texts together, with a range of styles, subjects, and goals for each theme, takes each group of images out of their context, undermining what would seem to be their individual intent, and constructs meaning through their relationships. Ultimately, the work’s dynamic historic context, as a locus of human interactions and values, intends to charge this cultural landscape with significance far beyond the Oceano Dunes.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea, Oceano Dunes SVRA, 2022
© Lana Z Caplan / from the book Oceano published by Kehrer Verlag

Oceano (for seven generations) is a collection of excellent images that give you pause and make you wonder what to make of the situations. In the context of a landscape that is deeply historical, this book allows us to ask good questions. The result is provocative.

Lana Z. Caplan is an Associate Professor of Photography and Video at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

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