Photograph Lana Z Caplan chronicles the storied Oceano Dunes

There’s just something about Oceano, Guadalupe, and Nipomo that draws outside-the-box types. 

The first inhabitants were the Chumash tribe, who lived in harmony with nature. Then the Spanish showed up and changed everything. 

In 1903, Syracuse, New York-based theosophical organization Temple of the People established Halcyon, a utopian religious community that still exists in the area. 

From the 1920s until the 1940s, the dunes were home to the Dunites, a group of artists, writers, mystics, nudists, and hermits who lived in little shacks. 

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments transformed the dunes into ancient Egypt, erecting the City of the Pharaoh that featured 12-story-tall gates, huge temple walls, and 21 5-ton plaster sphinxes. 

In 1948, the U.S. Vegan Society was founded there. 

In 1982, a portion of the dunes was designated a State Vehicular Recreation Area. By 2019, environmentalists were battling off-highway vehicle users and trying to shut down the dunes to traffic, and in 2021, the California Coastal Commission voted to ban off-roading. That didn’t last. You can still drive on the dunes, and the battle continues.

No wonder someone like photographer, scholar, and Cal Poly associate professor of photography and video Lana Z Caplan became captivated by the unusual area. Her exhibition of photographs as well as accompanying artifacts and displays titled Oceano—For Seven Generations is currently on exhibit in Cal Poly’s newly remodeled Kennedy Library.

Caplan began working at Cal Poly in 2016.

“When I moved here, I didn’t know anything about the Central Coast,” she explained. “I was teaching photo and video classes, teaching a photo history class. Of course, I knew Edward Weston’s photos [of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes]. I was teaching about modernism, and I pulled up his images, and I saw the title ‘Oceano’ on some of his dune images, and I thought, ‘Oh, I think I passed that on the 101. I think that’s near here.’ I was intrigued and was like, ‘OK, I’m ready to go see this mythic place and the iconic landscape of history, of geography.’”

She began researching and first learned about the Dunites. 

“There was this artist colony that was living in the dunes 100 years ago in these salvaged wood shacks and making paintings and poems, and astrologers, and nudists, and the grandson of a president. I was hooked,” she smiled.

Then she learned about the off-roading and the air quality and court battles.

“I thought, ‘OK, this is larger than quirky California history.’ This has a contemporary relevance, and that’s what made the project enduring for me.”

She photographed all things dunes-related for years—2017 through 2023—and in 2023 published her monograph, Oceano (for seven generations), which covered the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash connection, the Dunites, The Ten Commandments set, the offroad vehicle culture, and the environmental battle. 

Figuring out what kind of story she wanted to tell through her photos was a process.

“For me, the storytelling is a big component of my project because for each of the threads of research that I ended up incorporating into my project, each one was told by a different type of storyteller,” she explained. “You have the Chumash who’ve been here over 10,000 years. If you hear the story from the [Spanish] missions [perspective], it’s one story. You hear the story from the Chumash people, it’s another story. The same idea applies for every one of these aspects of culture and history that have been laid on this landscape. It depends on the storyteller, so to incorporate myself as a storyteller, how do I present this story?”

‘I really think the audience is smart and can make their own decisions about how they feel or what they see when presented with information.’
—Lana Z Caplan, photographer

Since the Dunites no longer exist, Caplan turned to Norm Hammond, author of The Dunites and collector of Dunite artifacts.

“Luckily, Norm Hammond is an amazing collaborator and generous person all around,” Caplan said. “I met with Norm several times, and he told me stories and shared with me objects from his archive. So artworks made by the Dunites, poetry written by the Dunites, letters written by Dunites when they were living in the dunes—all these kinds of what we call ‘primary sources’ in academia helped inform the story.”

There is a surviving Dunite cabin that was built by in the early ’30s by Gavin Arthur, grandson of President Chester Alan Arthur, that was salvaged in the late 1940s, moved, stored for years, reconstructed, and eventually found a permanent home behind the Oceano Train Depot in 2010.

“It’s not really representative of living in the dunes,” Caplan noted. “It was used as a vacation rental in Pismo for many years, and then the Oceano Depot Association raised funds to move it. It’s like a little monument to the Dunites that Norm actually manages and maintains and puts little exhibitions inside.”

Between Caplan’s photos, Hammond’s collection, and some items from Cal Poly Library’s Special Collection, Caplan’s show is a coalescing of multiple overlapping stories of the strangely magnetic place. She has maps that show her five different threads of research. There’s also a wall-sized video installation. The photos are stunning, and you can feel the care she took in chronicling these sometimes disparate and battling factions.

“That was a tricky aspect of this project because I didn’t want to villainize or victimize anybody,” Caplan said. “I really think the audience is smart and can make their own decisions about how they feel or what they see when presented with information. 

“So, for me, it was not about taking sides or presenting one story. It’s really this multitude of stories.” ∆

Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Oct 1-8, 2026.