The Camera and the Cloister: Photography and the Colonial Afterlife of the California Missions

As Spanish Franciscan colonial institutions, the Alta California missions had relatively short physical lives. They were constructed and visually embellished during the last decades of the 18th century and early years of the 19th, then secularized in the 1830s, coinciding with the advent of photography. The nascent medium quickly turned its lens toward the missions, often drawn to them as emblematic subjects of a fading colonial past. These photographic engagements, motivated variously by aesthetic, Romantic, ethnographic, preservationist, and U.S. imperialist imperatives, sought to capture what was perceived as the “twilight” of the Spanish Franciscan project. Yet even in their apparent neutrality or nostalgia, photographs of mission art and architecture—a sealed monjerío doorway, a whitewashed cloister wall, or a deteriorating adobe roof—can be understood as visual documents that index the enduring legacies of colonial violence.

Drawing from memory studies and photographic theory, this paper interrogates the role of 19th- and early 20th-century photography in both recording and reanimating the material and spatial dimensions of Franciscan colonialism. It examines how photography has captured and at times unwittingly exposed the mechanisms of enslavement, cultural erasure, spatial displacement, and the alienation of Indigenous communities. Image case studies will reference the Cupeño Trail of Tears and the incarceration of Native women within mission monjeríos, both of which underscore the power of the photograph to mediate—and complicate—our understanding of the mission system’s visual and colonial afterlives.