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Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
A Palace of a Lost People
Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
Photograph and Digital Image © Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Not for reproduction or publication.
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Object number1961/2.54

A Palace of a Lost People

Artist (American, 1872-1947)
Date1909
Mediumcarbon print
Dimensionsmat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
image (flush): 13 3/4 × 10 7/8 in. (34.9 × 27.6 cm)
Credit LineDirector's Fund
Label TextCarl Christiansen was a Chicago-based Pictorialist photographer and mailman working in the early twentieth century. Like other Pictorialists, he manually manipulated his photographs to achieve a soft, misty effect intended to help photographs resemble the loose brushwork in favor at a time when Impressionism (and other, similarly expressive styles) reigned supreme. Though discussions of American Pictorialism often revolve around the work of New York photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, Christiansen’s work is an example of the broad influence of the style in the early twentieth century. Christiansen was first inspired to pursue photography by a meeting with the Swedish photographic pioneer Gustav Huerlein, and was a member of a Pictorialist group called the Chicago Photo Fellows who displayed their works together in the 1900s and 1910s. Christiansen was especially devoted to carbon printing, a messy and tedious process that he nonetheless treasured for its “poetic nature”. While he was an avid practitioner of the medium for several decades, in the 1920s he quit photographic work to devote himself to oil painting. A Palace of a Lost People was taken in Colorado, meaning that it likely pictures Mesa Verde or another Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site in the state. Though it is true that Ancestral Puebloans had ceased to exist under mysterious circumstances hundreds of years before Christiansen visited the Southwest, the print’s title suggests that Christiansen adopted a romantic and elegiac approach toward Native Americans that was typical of the era in which he was working, during which the racist notion that Indigenous Americans were a “vanishing race” that was disappearing in the face of white racial superiority was a common trope.

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