ABSTRACT
Cardozo was one of California’s most enterprising photographers. Working in the small Californian town of Ferndale, her photographs neatly captured the transformations taking place in studio portraiture as the late Victorian-era gave way to the Edwardian period. They also record the moment when portrait photography began being influenced by impressionist painting and the snapshot effects that resulted from shorter exposure times. The chapter argues that Cardozo’s success as a photographer owed much to her ability to keep up with fashions both in photography couture and studio props. Her photographs for example record the children, debutants and members of the nouveau rich families of Ferndale and the new womanly ideal with its lighter styles of dress and deportment that emerged in the late 1890s partly as a result of the Women’s Movement. On a darker note the chapter also argues that the bourgeois taste and expensive lifestyles of Cardozo’s all-white clientele owed much to Ferndale’s violent past -in particular the earlier systematic killings and forceful removal of Humboldt Bay’s Native Americans. It is in this sense that Cardozo’s work must be seen as inseparable from California’s rarely acknowledged history of genocide.
