6:00pm Pre-Talk Salon With the Photographer Before His 7:00pm Presentation
Robert Buelteman is the only artist given unlimited access to the 24,000-acre Crystal Springs Watershed that we traverse every time we drive “over the hill.” What began in 1984 as a personal creative project grew and became his award-winning 1995 monograph, The Unseen Peninsula. During his ten years on the property, this lifelong resident of the Peninsula developed a deep appreciation of its history, including the role played by historic Spanishtown, now Half Moon Bay.
Join us for an informative presentation about this important piece of land whose development gave rise to the city of San Francisco and provides for the high quality of life we enjoy here on the coast. Learn about the 1866 San Mateo-Spanishtown turnpike, the 1874 Crystal Springs Resort, the first vineyard planted in California, and Lower Crystal Springs Dam, completed in 1890 as the largest concrete structure anywhere in the world.
Images from Buelteman’s The Unseen Peninsula:
(Click images to enlarge)
About the Speaker
Robert Buelteman is a celebrated fine art photographer whose works connect audience to subject in an emotionally transcendent manner, in the tradition of eastern wisdom and western revelation. Whether examining the spirit of the landscape or inquiring into the design of nature, his work is a powerful extraction of beauty and substance revealing unrecognized dimensions in the commonplace.
He has published seventeen photographic portfolios over his forty years in photography, and three of these, The Unseen Peninsula (1994), Eighteen Days in June (2000), and Signs of Life (2009) were published as award-winning monographs. In 1999, Buelteman left photographic tradition behind in creating Through the Green Fuse, a portfolio of energetic photograms made without cameras, lenses, or computers. From 2010 – 2014 he was a guest at Stanford University’s highly restricted Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.
He has received accolades from institutions as diverse as the United States Congress, Commonwealth Club of California, Committee for Green Foothills, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Since 2010 his art has been the subject of dozens of essays in 26 languages on six continents around the globe, and can be found in public and private collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Accel-KKR, Bank of America, Abingworth, Adobe Systems, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Stanford University, Xerox, and Nikon.
