Exhibit Celebrates State’s Lighthouses

Savers of countless lives.

Comforting beacons that provide hope and a reminder of home.

Watchful sentinels in a timeless conflict between seafarers and an unforgiving ocean.

A pictorial exhibit showcasing the history and beauty of California’s 32 lighthouses opens today at the Ventura County Maritime Museum at Oxnard’s Channel Islands Harbor.

“They have a certain romance about them, a certain kind of style,” said David Leach, the museum’s operations manager, whose passion for the subject led to the exhibit. “A lot of them are remote, they’re in spectacular locations, they’re pretty.”

They are also an integral part of the state’s history. The development of lighthouses coincided with the European settlement of California, Leach said.

But the 44 photographic portraits--from a pristine lighthouse in San Francisco Bay that now houses a $300-a-night bed and breakfast, to a rundown Port Hueneme structure due to be renovated in 1998--show that lighthouses are more than dry historical buildings.

Lighthouses evoke inexplicably powerful sentiments, said Irvine photographer Kornelius Schorle. The German native, who has taken more than 700 pictures of lighthouses around the world, had a $65,000 camera custom-built for that purpose in Switzerland.

During his wanderings, Schorle says, he has encountered people who weep as they seek to explain their attachment.

He, too, has difficulty explaining the attraction of lighthouses. In these high-tech days, sailors no longer rely upon lighthouses as a navigational aid. Lighthouse keepers are a thing of the past, too, since sophisticated equipment has replaced the people who labored long and hard in isolation to keep the light shining.

“Maybe the technology that replaced them is so far ahead of our humanity that we need places to go and reminisce about a time where our humanity was far ahead of our technology,” Schorle explains in a note accompanying his 19 lighthouse images in the exhibit.

Port Hueneme’s lighthouse, believed to have been the last to be built in California when it was completed in 1939 to replace a wooden predecessor that burned, is one of two in the county.

The second is on Anacapa Island.

A third structure, dubbed “the light that wasn’t” by Leach, is a decorative lighthouse at Channel Islands Harbor that was built in the mid-1970s to house ice-making equipment for the commercial fishing industry. The equipment was never installed because the industry failed to thrive at the harbor, Leach said.

Schorle--and his special camera--will attend a wine and cheese opening reception at 3 p.m. at the museum, 2731 S. Victoria Ave. The cost to non-museum members is $3; members will be admitted free. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, and the exhibit will continue through Oct. 12.