Calaveras Dam

One of the leading California-based photographers of the mid-twentieth century, Lavenson is best known for images that evoke the region’s history through architecture. Here, however, she inventively captured a new engineering marvel, the Calaveras Dam in Alameda County, which was the largest earth-fill dam in the world when it was completed in 1925. Lavenson’s composition focuses on the structure apart from its surroundings and emphasizes its abstract form through the fall of light and shadow on its stepped edifice, the shape of which recalls ancient ziggurats and pyramids. Large dams symbolized progress in the 1920s, which is why Thomas Hart Benton included one in Instruments of Power, the largest panel in his America Today mural (see Gallery 909).