Oceano

These are the dunes of Edward Weston’s iconic photos; of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 buried movie set for The Ten Commandments; of the Dunites— the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics who lived in dune shacks from the 1920s to the 40s—hosts to Weston during shooting trips; and fundamentally, of the native Chumash. These dunes now host a landscape of ATVs, inciting a decade-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality. Lana Z Caplan attended Air Pollution Control District hearings, met with historians, scoured archives, and collaborated withyak tit?u tit?u yak tilhini Northern Chumash tribal leadership to excavate these histories in images. Ultimately, Oceano questions the legacies of colonization, photographic history, utopian ideology, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.