Point Loma Lighthouse Seen from the Dunes, San Diego, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Point Loma Lighthouse Seen from the Dunes, San Diego, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Point Loma Lighthouse Seen from the Dunes, San Diego, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-58AEC6

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Someone climbed a scrubby dune above the Pacific with a camera and a plan: get the lighthouse in the frame without walking all the way down to it. The New Point Loma Lighthouse stands where the Navy and the Lighthouse Service put it in 1891, tall enough to be seen from a ridge a mile off, which was rather the point.

By the 1950s the station had electric lights and a paved access road, so the romance of a hand-tended beacon was mostly historical even then, kept alive by postcards and by tourists who hiked up for exactly this view. The keeper's cottages and outbuildings cluster around the tower with the tidy self-importance of a government installation that knows ships are watching it, even if nobody else is.

Whoever took this picture chose foreground over subject, filling most of the frame with sand, chaparral, and a boulder, and leaving the actual landmark small and distant near the horizon. It is the classic tourist's mistake of a scenic overlook: the view is magnificent, and the photograph proves it only in miniature.

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