People who come to California from somewhere else are often unprepared for this place. Wallace Stegner wrote of California that “perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have to be modified” here, and we discover the need “to learn all over again how to see.” The photographer Sam Contis, originally from the East Coast, was compelled by the idea of recalibrating her vision of the American West through the lens of the Golden State—a dreamland defined by desert, drought, Hollywood films, heat, cowboys, freedom, reinvention, and open space. Read More