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Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge 1867–1957


2008

The Portland Art Museum is organizing a major exhibition of photographs of the Columbia River Gorge from 1867, the year that legendary landscape photographer Carleton E. Watkins first arrived here, to 1957, the year that The Dalles Dam was completed, inundating the 10,000-year-old fishing grounds at Celilo Falls. Organized by the Museum's curator of photography, Terry Toedtemeier, this exhibition of roughly 300 images chronicles the beauty and changing character of this dramatic passage of the river, and illuminates the concurrent advances made in photographic technology, materials, and processes.

The exhibition will be organized in five sections. The first section comprises work by the San Francisco based Watkins, who made four expeditions to the Northwest from 1867 to 1885. Using a custom-built "mammoth" camera, the largest camera then in use in the United States, and working with collodion wet-plate glass negatives, Watkins created some of the most exquisite and significant landscape photographs made during the 19th century. In the Columbia Gorge, he captured epic images of a landscape in transition as European-Americans were first beginning to reshape the West, including photographs of transportation and settlements along the river.

The second section of the exhibition encompasses the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, during which the rapid growth of rail transportation provided new opportunities for such photographers as Benjamin Gifford and the Kiser brothers in giving them greater access to the Gorge. Railroad companies, seeking to promote their destinations and the views to be seen along the way, also offered a new market for their scenic photographs.

The third part of the exhibition is devoted to the work of Lily White and Sarah Ladd, both associate members of Alfred Stieglitz's seminal Photo-Secession movement. During the summer months from 1903 to 1905, the two lived in the Gorge on a houseboat equipped with its own darkroom. Photographing from dawn to dusk, good weather to bad, they joined their understanding of photography and their love of the land to produce platinum prints of some of the most distinctive images of the light and atmosphere of the Gorge.

The fourth section of the exhibition embraces the period beginning just before World War I, when the Columbia River Highway substantially increased access to the Gorge and facilitated an increased tourist trade in scenic imagery. Photographers such as Arthur Prentiss, George Weister, and Clarence Winter recorded the highway's development, capturing this major engineering accomplishment and the vistas that it availed. Included in this section are lovely hand-colored images, scenic black-and-white photographs that were painstakingly painted over in color.

The concluding section of Wild Beauty, from 1930 to 1957, includes both aerial images and early color photography, and chronicles the period during which first Bonneville Dam and then The Dalles Dam were built. Ray Atkeson, Al Monner, and their contemporaries took advantage of emerging photographic technologies to continue making exceptional images of the Gorge's stunning landscape, even as the river's course and flow were being irretrievably altered.

Curated by Terry Toedtemeier

Details
Exhibition Title

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge 1867–1957

Date

2008

Curated by

Terry Toedtemeier

Organized by

Portland Art Museum

Begin Date

2008-10-04

End Date

2009-01-11

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