Lana Z Caplan
Lana Z Caplan
OCEANO (for seven generations)
Hardcover
30 x 24cm
128 pages
75 color and b/w illustrations
2023
Kehrer Verlag
About the Book:
Lana Z Caplan spent seven years researching and collaborating with the communities of Oceano, California and yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribal leadership, to produce a conceptual collection of histories from the Oceano Dunes. These are the dunes of Weston’s modernist photographs; of Cecil B. DeMille’s recently excavated and restored sphinxes from his 1923 Ten Commandments movie set, buried in the sand after filming; of the nearly lost Northern Chumash tribe; of the Dunites – the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics squatting in dune shacks in the 1920’s-40’s – who hosted Weston during his shooting trips; and of the 1.5 million ATV riders who visit each year, inciting a decades-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality.
Oceano (for seven generations) tells the story of Oceano while interrogating photographic conventions regarding landscape and representation. Black and white landscapes are flipped into negatives, confusing the notion of photographic truth and challenging the male-dominated history of the genre. Portraits are co-constructed performative gestures rather than documents. Multiple modalities of image making references Modernists, New Topographics, ethnographic typologies, and advertising. Ultimately, Oceano questions the legacies of colonization, photographic history, utopian ideologies, the politics of land use, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.
Book review by Dana Stirling |
Lana Z Caplan’s Oceano (for seven generations) is a book that resists simplicity. In the shifting sands of California’s Oceano Dunes, Caplan unearths a layered history of occupation, industry, and ideology, revealing a landscape where past and present collide. With striking visual clarity, she embraces contradiction, offering a portrait of a place both fiercely contested and deeply loved.
The Oceano Dunes, located along California’s central coast near Pismo Beach, are a vast and dynamic coastal sand dune system, renowned for their dramatic landscapes and recreational draw. One of the few places in the state where off-highway vehicles (OHVs) are allowed on the sand, the dunes attract adventure seekers and nature lovers alike. Yet, beyond their thrill-seeking appeal, they serve as a fragile ecological habitat. The dunes have long been the subject of environmental debates, as conservationists and local residents push to protect the land from ongoing degradation.
These same dunes have inspired generations of artists, poets, and photographers—including Edward Weston—but they are, first and foremost, the unceded land of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash. The yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash are an Indigenous people of California’s Central Coast, whose ancestral lands stretch from Morro Bay to the Santa Maria River. Their name, meaning "the people of the village of the full moon" reflects their deep connection to the land and its natural rhythms. For thousands of years, they lived in balance with this environment, fishing, hunting, and gathering, developing a rich cultural and spiritual tradition tied to the coastal ecosystem. Today, they continue to advocate for the protection of their sacred lands, including the Oceano Dunes, while also fighting for federal recognition of their rights and heritage.
And yet, today, the dunes host a different kind of occupation—throngs of ATV riders carving across the sand, locked in an ongoing legal and cultural battle with environmentalists and local residents over the right to use and the right to preserve. Caplan does not take sides. Instead, she constructs a visual excavation, sifting through archival traces, historical remnants, and contemporary realities to reveal a site of layered and contested meanings. Oceano does not follow the familiar arc of environmental protest photography; there is no single villain, no clear moral imperative. Instead, the book captures the coexistence of vastly different relationships to the land—gleaming helmets of ATV riders, the fragile remains of old homesteads, the wreckage of abandoned vehicles, and the quiet persistence of the dunes themselves. The photographs reject sentimentality but demand engagement, placing the viewer in a space of tension where beauty and destruction, memory and erasure, stand side by side.
At its core, Oceano asks: How do we reckon with the weight of history in a living, changing landscape? The book does not offer an answer—it does something harder. It forces us to sit with the discomfort of the question, to see with clarity, and to recognize that the fight for land is never just about land. It is about identity, belonging, and the narratives we construct around both. The book’s subtitle, for seven generations, references a core Chumash principle—that decisions made today must consider the impact on those who will live seven generations into the future. This ethos runs through Caplan’s approach, not only in her subject matter but in the very structure of the book itself.
Through the interplay of black-and-white images—perhaps a nod to the work of Weston—and contemporary color landscapes, Caplan allows us to see the dunes in their primordial stillness and their present, human-marked state. The juxtaposition reveals a truth we cannot ignore: while the dunes may appear eternal, they are not untouched, nor are they immune to change. Oceano invites us to look more closely, to question more deeply, and perhaps, to consider our role in shaping what remains.
