Stanford University
CESTA

This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
California Time: Every Photograph is a History
This is a project about California and its history as told through modern photographs –largely contemporary landscape photographs by Jesse White. It intends to tell a history of California from what are now its margins –the edges of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the Central Valley. The photographs are of some places rarely visited –the Tulare Basin, Mare Island, and Union Island. Others are well known but not central to modern California: Point Reyes and the San Gabriel River and San Gabriel mission.

The project uses pictures as guides to a past they still contain. It puts them in conversation with documents, maps, and other photographs. The conversations yield stories, and the stories a history.

Spatial History