Tamara Cedré
at the California Museum of Photography

Tamara Cedré, The Leveled Top of Mt. Slover (2024). Archival pigment print. Image courtesy of the artist.

In their landmark publication Cruel Optimism (2011), the late queer affect theorist Lauren Berlant articulates the cruelty of having a hope that is predestined to fail. Citing the various methods for feeling attached and secure in contemporary life (e.g., job security and sociopolitical equity), Berlant argues that such aspirations are not only unsustainable but predicated on contingency and crisis.¹ This desire for the “good life” against the cruelty of liberal capitalism was especially pronounced in Tamara Cedré’s exhibition Live from the Frontline (Colton and Fontana) at the California Museum of Photography. Cedré’s exhibition joined photography, audio, found film, archival documents, and drone footage to examine the rise and rapid expanse of manufacturing and distribution facilities throughout the Inland Empire (I.E.) from the early twentieth century to the present day. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with A People’s History of the I.E., a digital archive and mapping platform that documents the histories of working-class, LGBTQIA+, and POC communities in Riverside and San Bernardino, CA, through oral histories, written testimonies, photographic archives, educational resources, and community organizing.

Live from the Frontline was an expansive, multimedia rumination on the industrial transformation of sub/urban landscapes. The exhibition followed the tenuous histories of Kaiser Steel and Colton Portland Cement, two facilities whose rampant and well-documented histories of worker exploitation, pollution into nearby working-class communities of color, and entanglement with the military-industrial complex are palpable not only in the exhibition but to the communities themselves.² A dizzying array of archival materials and photographs, including promotional brochures from Kaiser Steel, marketing trinkets such as a paperweight, and family photos of Colton residents who lived around the cement plant, were installed on the gallery walls. A large vitrine featured annual reports and postcards from Kaiser Steel laid near materials that pointed to worker exploitation: a Fontana Works strike and pollution poster; parodic comic strips of Henry J. Kaiser; candid photos of workers in precarious labor conditions; and the corporate satire paper The Snorter, which was created by and for Kaiser Steel employees.

Cedré’s curation of objects and documents that attest to the industrial violence wrought upon primarily Latinx, Indigenous, and Black communities was nuanced through their proximity to neighboring materials tinged with more utopic sentiments. Promotional city posters such as Colton The Hub City, created by the Colton Chamber of Commerce in 1914, depict a hybrid industrial landscape whose topography is replete with a thriving citrus grove, active railway, factories, and “good schools,” as written on the poster. An archival photograph by G. Haven Bishop titled Power Consumers, Portland Cement Works, Colton, Southern California Edison (1910), positions the Colton factory comfortably on the horizon line between a clear, vast sky, expansive plain, and the San Bernardino foothills. Not entirely within the viewer’s reach, the factory appears as a distant, almost tangible industrial oasis, pluming with activity.

Archival reproductions of personal photographs like those in Colunga Family Snapshots from South Colton (1945–54), courtesy of the Colunga family, disrupted this sense of dis/utopic isolation. Stills of heteronuclear Latinx families posing idyllically against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming city typify the romanticism attributed to upward economic mobility—an alluring promise to many migrant communities in the early and mid-twentieth century. In the exhibition, these photos were placed in tension with candid shots that tell a different story: An image of a worker lugging a crate downhill while people gather leisurely in the distance, and various stills of empty factory lots speckled with telephone wires, puncture the idealism of neighboring photos with the grievous realities of the class divide.

These extensive archival materials were met with photographs, audio, and video works made by Cedré, many of which appropriated and subverted the formal strategies and aesthetics of the archival photographs. For example, Cedré’s photograph, The Leveled Top of Mt. Slover (2024), closely mirrors the visually balanced sightline in Bishop’s Power Consumers. Her depiction of Slover Mountain features a strikingly similar use of industrial steel exteriors; however, unlike Bishop’s paradisiacal landscape, The Leveled Top features a seemingly endless stack of freight containers, turbid clouds, and no sign of active life apart from the trace of tire marks imprinted in the dirt. Cedré’s contrasting photograph de-romanticizes the affinities Bishop attached to an industry in its nascency, looking instead towards its alienating and rampant homogeneity in the contemporary present.

Cedré expands on this idea in the video Kaiser Steel Productions (2024), which intercuts aerial drone footage of Eagle Mountain in Riverside County with found footage from a Kaiser Steel company promotional film touting stable employment. A film clip of a disaffected man attending a children’s baseball game concludes the video as a disembodied narrator ruminates on mass layoffs and union strikes, the likes of which would impact the mill’s 8,800 employees until its shuttering in 1983.³ Far from presenting the fallout from these facilities as phenomena long since passed, Cedré’s works demonstrate their ongoing role in displacing minoritized communities. Installed around the corner from this video were two separate Soundscapes titled Colton and Fontana (both 2024), which narrated the often-conflicting attachments many workers and families held with such industries.⁴ These oral histories included stories from those with an immediate or extended affiliation with Kaiser Steel and Colton Portland Cement.

One narrator in the Fontana soundscape talks at length about the effects of environmental pollution proliferated by Kaiser Steel. Specifically citing the prevalence of industrial contamination and re-spatialization of urban working-class communities of color, narrators within both soundscapes discuss how the encroachment of such facilities is connected to an extended history of racism and displacement.⁵ Many of the narrators broadly attest to how industry gets people economically, emotionally, physiologically, and geographically stuck—what scholar Sara Ahmed calls the “stickiness” of affective entanglements.⁶ As part of a broader rumination on how minoritized communities are exploited through globalization, Cedré nuances the optimism often attached to industrialization. She shows how the harm of a postindustrial present must be not only contended with but actively dislodged from personal and collective fantasies of the good life.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 38.

April Baca (xe/xem) is a Los Angeles-based writer, educator, and occasional curator. Xer research focuses on contemporary visual media and performance, with an emphasis on alternative ontologies and digital reconstructions. Xe has contributed to various anthologies, catalogs, and publications, including, but not limited to, Artforum, Art Journal, and X-TRA.

More by April Baca