At the age of eleven I attended a summer camp for boys in Pennsylvania. The owner, known by all as Doc, roamed the expansive grounds in a golf cart. During the frequent science fairs, he took pleasure in demonstrating a box that dispensed electric shocks. After approaching the contraption, one set the dial and gripped the handles. Having watched a friend select maximum juicing and not experience any apparent discomfort, I was emboldened to try my luck at a lower setting. I indicated my readiness, the switch was flipped, and I jumped as a large jolt surged through my body. More shocking than my introduction to alternating current was the later explanation by counselors and other campers that the dial regulated nothing and fostered an illusion of agency. I was furious at having been duped and cheated of what I most wanted—objective measurement and controlled display of the effects of an otherwise invisible force.

Since Thomas Edison began selling electricity 135 years ago, the power industry has sought to provide images through which its product along with its safety and uses might be promoted, thus rendering the most imperceptible of commodities the subject of advertising images, photographs, and films. United by the goal of relocating electricity from the precincts of religion, where lightning had been associated with divine agency, to the frontiers of scientific and technological progress, these campaigns were ubiquitous from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. (On the relation of electricity to American religion and spiritualism, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.) Their impact on the visual arts, architecture, popular culture, and conceptions of politics, society, and national life can scarcely be underestimated (see Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Today they constitute some of the most comprehensively studied episodes in the histories of technology and modernism. (Standard works relating these histories are Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; and David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.) As the twenty-first century is remade by very different technological revolutions, the fascination exerted by the culture of electricity shows no sign of abating.

Of all the functions electricity served, illumination was the most important and quickly became the favored subject matter of visual representations. Films and photographs of Coney Island and other amusement parks glowing at night and of the neon signage which soon permeated every metropolis became ubiquitous signs of the modern world. Practitioners of artistic movements as varied as the Ashcan School, Futurism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Deco, the New Objectivity, news photography, film noir, and the French New Wave created images of the city pierced by electric light which in turn did much to generate new meanings of darkness, and indeed the night itself—no longer the preserve of the socially and politically dangerous but now beckoning the middle classes as well. (For a study of the European context, see Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, London: Reaktion Books, 1998.) The age of gas light memorably depicted in nineteenth-century culture was over. (These transformations are addressed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.)

Large corporations such as the German AEG and Dutch Philips created memorable advertising campaigns for the lightbulb, the first consumer product of the electric age. (The work of German architect and designer Peter Behrens is discussed in Tilmann Buddensieg and Henning Rogge, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.) Yet the decision of General Electric to name its bulb after Ahura Mazda, “the transcendental and universal God of Zoroastrianism whose name means light of wisdom (Ahura = light, Mazda = wisdom) in the Avestan language” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_%28light_bulb%29; accessed October 30, 2013), suggests that even mass production never entirely divested electricity of its association with life force and the divine. That achievement would be realized by an artist of a later moment, Andy Warhol, who introduced the electric chair into his work in 1963, just as New York State would cease to employ it as a means of capital punishment. (Warhol’s Orange Disaster #5, an acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas, is the work in question.) As if to drive home the point, his epic eight-hour film Empire made the following year dissolved the mystique of the Empire State Building into grainy materiality and composed an epitaph for the romance of the modern with the illuminated skyscraper, now rendered thoroughly prosaic, a once new technology that had become old. (Illumination in architecture is treated by Dietrich Neumann, ed., Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building, Munich: Prestel, 2002.)

If the broad history of electrification is today well known, details of its local manifestations are not. How people lived, shopped, studied, recreated, traveled, and created images in specific electrified cultures is far from well understood; and given what we know about the reception of technologies such as the automobile, the airplane, and the computer, there is little reason to believe that electricity was received everywhere in the same manner. The signal contribution of the online exhibition Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940–1990 is to introduce an essential resource for studying electrification in Southern California: the archive of the Southern California Edison Company, comprising 70,000 photo albums, antique lantern slides, glass negatives, motion picture reels, sheet film, prints from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, acquired in 2006 by the Huntington Library.

Sponsored by the Pacific Standard Time Presents initiative of the Getty (click here for review), historians of California William Deverell and Greg Hise curated Form and Landscape by inviting fifteen scholars, writers, and artists to choose photographs from the rich Christmas pudding of the Edison collection. Each picked a group of photographs and wrote a short text for her or his selections. Grouped in the categories Consumption, Fabrication, Domesticity, Labor, Foodscapes, Scale, Light, Technology, Collisions, Noir, Flora, Streetscapes, Landscape, Text, Undocumented, Landscape, Recreation, Repeat, the images are alternately haunting, hilarious, and strange. Many evoke the technological progress and consumerism one finds celebrated in the industrial films collected by Rick Prellinger, or parodied in the films of Bruce Conner, or akin to the détournement of images practiced by the Situationist International.

After the giddy rush of encountering a photograph of a woman caressing a lightbulb, a utility company spokesman standing in front of an ominous diagram of a power grid, or hundreds of images like them—manna for teachers of cultural modernity that could provide decades of student assignments—the challenge remains of determining what the sponsor of these photographs sought from them. That many of these pictures appear barely to relate to electricity—or to any other identifiable product, for that matter—leads to speculation about their meanings and the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they circulated. In the absence of this contextual information, the capitalist phantasmagoria and spectacle theorized by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Guy Debord may compose the most helpful conceptual framework into which to receive this past in our present.

Again and again, the electric glow of restaurant signs or the practically audible hum of large machines in these photographs suggests that celebrating a cult of progress was integral to electrification in the Southern California Basin. Catherine Opie nicely evokes the linkage between electricity and the technological sublime in her image portfolio and in her “Fabrication” fictional narrative of an Edison photographer she calls The Company Man. Hise provides a useful overview (including maps) of the institutional and infrastructural operations of Edison in his Scale selection, which is nicely complemented by Peter Westwick in Technology.

Breakdowns and accidents also belong to this history of technology, as the images of automobile crashes collected by Deverell in Collisions attest. The recurring images of generators, network towers, illuminated businesses, appliances, single-family homes, and skylines across the image portfolios suggest a relatively small number of visual tropes emphasizing size, power, and distance performed much of the ideological heavy lifting, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, that allowed these photographs to appear compelling to viewers at the time. (David Nye, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996 and Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 are two studies relevant to understanding the social and cultural significance of machine imagery in American modernism.) Abundant as it is with interstitial information far in excess of its ostensible subject matter, the Edison collection will doubtless inspire research in fields such as gender studies, labor relations, geography, and the study of mass consumption.

A noticeable tendency toward the isolation of particular details and abstraction is also evident across the photographs in Form and Landscape, many of which were taken with consummate skill and evident awareness of the canons of art photography. In Archive, Huntington curator Jennifer Watts thoughtfully introduces G. Haven Bishop, the first photographer who worked for Edison and produced 30,000 images—nearly half of the entire archive—from the turn of the century until 1939. Bishop, Doug White, Art Adams, and Joseph Fadler plausibly constitute a quartet whose photographs for the company frequently transcended the requirements of documentation to enter the territory of art. Even the most finicky of connoisseurs will doubtless find that many of their images could pass muster on the walls of any respectable museum. Yet the challenge to the very notion of photography as an art produced by this collection of images amassed for reasons unrelated to the imperatives of museums, galleries, and critics is not the least reason for its fascination. After I perused Form and Landscape, I had the impression that my understanding of photography had been expanded and refreshed, an electrifying experience indeed.