I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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The railroad, and especially the steam locomotive, has been profound to the American culture. Especially in the Western regions of the U.S., where the railroad was integral to the development of modern civilization, the steam locomotive’s memory lives on in the collective imagination, despite the fact that the such machines ceased to be a meaningful force in the region’s economy more than half a century ago. Their endurance has something to do with their now foreign technological nature -- they are devices with their workings on the outside, crude yet elegant mechanical marvels that seem to breathe, seem to have a pulse, seem to be alive. Across the country, dozens upon dozens of steam locomotives survive in working order, cared for by loving and often unpaid crews, and run on numerous tourist and museum railroads. Many photo books on this subjects have been published -- the steam locomotive with its built-in special effects is a sort-of camera magnet, after all -- but few manage to rise beyond being overwrought photo albums. There is always something slightly treacly, slightly forced about these books, possibly because there is often something of the same nature in their subjects, a feeling of canned history. Yet somehow, Joel Jensen has created a work that surpasses these, a book that shows us preserved steam as merely a continuation of an unbroken tradition going back to the workaday, pre-digital world. In Steam: An Enduring Legacy, Jensen gives us not only a glimpse into a harder, grittier, sweatier side of preserved steam, but also a work of excellent photography that stands as an artistic achievement in its own right.
The book is not a guidebook but an extended photographic journey through the survivors of the steam era. It begins with an essay by writer-photographer Scott Lothes, who provides a brief introduction to the cultural importance of the steam locomotive. The essay tells us the basics, but to anyone with knowledge of railroad history it will provide little new; clearly this is meant as a primer for the uninitiated, and it serves this job well. Following this, the bulk of the photographs appear in a gallery section. There is no set sequence, with the subjects bouncing back and forth through time and geography. Most of these images are displayed one-per-page, with healthy white margins at all sides. After the photograph section of the book is another essay, this time by John Gruber, founder and president of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. Gruber relates an overview of preservation and the steam locomotive, including some interesting tidbits about early, 19th century preservation movements and an able survey of contemporary efforts. He completes his essay with an overview of photography’s relationship with the preserved steam locomotive. An afterword penned by photographer Jeff Brouws follows, with an apt assessment of Jensen’s photographic style. A page of acknowledgements from Jensen complete the work.
I am intimately familiar with the tourist and heritage railway world, and so, despite my respect for the photographer and the authors, I was not anticipating this book to be particularly impressive. Aiding me in this pre-judgement was my familiarity with other works on this subject, as described above. I could not, in the end, have been more wrong. This work is a success that it transcends subject matter interest, and would serve to appeal even to the least nostalgic of railroad enthusiasts, if only they can be convinced to pick it up and look through it past its opening pages.
For these first few pages in, it is all billowing steam and dramatic light, and one might begin to fear that this will be yet one more album in the tradition of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, pleasant in a strawberry milkshake sort of way but not particularly memorable in its own right. It’s not that these dramatic images are bad: they are neither technically nor artistically flawed, but they are also of a genre that is not unfamiliar. But then, on page 22, it all changes in a characteristic Jensen fashion. The photo here, of two large steam locomotives and their long train of passenger cars silhoutted against a damp sky, is one of my favorites from this photographer, and I am disappointed at how small that the image runs in this book; nevertheless it breaks through the romantic bombast and begins a pattern of complex variety that marks this book as something special. Opposite this image is another fine stand-out, an image showing the roughshod nature of narrow gauge railroads, with a wandering pair of steel rails, barely any ties showing, splayed out through a ramshackle landscape, a tiny locomotive working hard to traverse the route. All darks and midtones, with barely a fleck of highlight anywhere, the image is teeth-gnashing and evocative.
The human aspect of these survivors is not neglected, and may in fact be one of the volume’s chief strengths. The careful inclusion of crewmen and other workers is a key aspect of this book’s DNA. From trackworkers hammering in spikes, to groundlings passing hand signals, to roundhouse monkeys wrestling with the oversize parts of these steel behemoths, people are a subtle but integral part to the visual story Jensen lays out for us. Sometimes they are ghostly figures, caught at work amidst the steam, while at other times, such as with a Durango and Silverton crew shown in a photo on page 57, they are cocky, defensive, weary, and proud, staring straight at the camera for a portrait the likes of which is as old as the relationship between the steam locomotive and cameras. Other similarly successful images include a portrait of a crewman for the ATSF 3751 on page 81, a Mount Rainier Scenic engineer on page 124, and mechanical workers from the Durango on 134 and 159. In some cases, these people wear the clothes of railroaders and shop workers for a century, bibs and long-sleeved work shirts and hard steel-toed boots, but in others they sport plastic hard hats and, in the case of the last of these images, modern wrap-around sunglasses. Often, photographers of contemporary steam seek to exclude such modern details, to try and recreate some sense of what they think the past was like, favoring costumes and playacting. Jensen here rejects this, and comes out with material that is intensely modern yet intensely authentic in ways that those seeking the Colonial Williamsburg of steam railroading always fail to achieve. These men look like the railroaders of the past because they are the railroaders of the past, and things like modern sunglasses don’t break the effect because such little trappings cannot contradict authenticity.
Failings? Few. One minor quibble is that the book is exclusively western material, but the book does not anywhere openly acknowledge this regional focus. This said, the book is subtitled as “the railroad photographs of Joel Jensen,” and Joel is a creature of the West, a photographer who is constantly roaming, constantly alone, and who sees the world through different eyes. And in the end, the artistic achievement of the photographer’s work makes complaints about his geographic biases seem trivial.
Overall production values are high, as one would expect in a book from a leading publisher such as Norton. That said, there are a few minor quibbles. The paper seems a tad thinner than I am used to expecting in such a book, so that when darker images are followed by a large white space on the next page, a very faint ghost can be read through the paper. It is, however, barely perceptible, and did not significantly detract from my enjoyment of the book. As for the photos themselves, reproduction is generally of high quality. There are times when I expected more shadow detail, but this is a common failing of black-and-white reproduction in printed matter, and overall Norton has done a great job with this. My only significant quibble with reproduction is with some of the larger images displayed across the gutter; a few, such as the image of an ATSF steam engine passing behind a graveyard on pages 70 and 71, appear rather soft, as if the prints had been scanned and then displayed larger than their original size.
This book at the end of the day is not at all about what it will be labelled as: it is not a photography book about tourist and heritage steam railroads. Instead, it is a book about undying tradition. No work has ever made contemporary steam more noble, more enviable, or harder work. The contradictions and anachronisms of these surviving steam locomotives and the crew that care for them are captured nakedly in Jensen’s photos, showing us something precious, something that is not at all playacting, but instead an unbroken thread to the relationship between man and steam that began on this continent in Antebellum times. This book will be of especial interest to those who appreciate steam locomotives, the interplay of railroads and geography, and the photography of railroads.
Although the Northwest boasts three major metropolitan regions -- Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland -- it is the small town that most defines the character of the region. With sparse populations, vast agricultural regions, and a legacy of resource based economics, the town (and sometimes, failed town) dots the landscape with regularity. In the post-industrial world, many of these towns have replaced their old ways of life with tourism, and few now would ever remember that a place such as Seaside, Oregon, for example, was once a timber town instead of a taffy town. Yet for every milltown turned tourist trap, there's a half dozen that remain truer to their heritages, and it is these more authentic and less famous towns of the Northwest that Foster Church has packed into his guidebook, Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest.
Church intends the book as a true guidebook, as with the dozens and dozens seen in the travel or regional sections of our area bookstores. Unlike many of these contemporaries, however, Church's volume aims at something more akin to authenticity. Explicit in the beginning is the admonition to treat visiting small towns differently, as the author exhorts the virtues of visiting the local Chamber of Commerce, reading the local paper, and eating breakfast in the local diner as ways to learn the local culture. A requirement of any town he has included is the provision of lodging; Church argues that a town that seems at first sleepy and passed-by will reveal itself better to a traveller the next morning.
Following a brief introduction in which the author lays out these arguments, the book is divided into five chapters, each corresponding to a specific region of the Northwest: the Willamette Valley, the Oregon Coast, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Washington. The bulk of Washington and the entirety of Idaho are excluded from the book, much less other states (or provinces) that have traditionally been described as Northwestern. This is perhaps understandable given that Church was a staff writer at the Portland Oregonian for over twenty years and is likely most familiar with Oregon towns or towns within a short drive of Portland, but the lack is noticeable and unfortunate, at a minimum bringing the choice of title into question. Within each chapter is an entry on a small town. In railroad fashion, the town name is followed by its elevation. Next comes a brief paragraph describing the road to the town; perhaps reflecting the author's interest in off-beat locations, all of the towns in the book but one (White Salmon, WA) are reachable only by road, although the presence of transit options is an unspoken likelihood. The bulk of the entry then consists of a short, generally narrative text describing a typical visit. The entry is then bookended by a single paragraph describing what Church terms "the basics" of lodging and dining. In all, 48 towns are covered. Following the entries is a brief epilogue and an index.
The author has walked a very fine line with this book. Although organized and promoted as a guidebook, Church gives us more a collection of small narratives, like a journalist encyclopedia of place. The writing is solid, verging on poetic at times with an occasional turn of phrase flashing through like agates on a sandy beach. Read as narrative, the book can almost be frustrating, as you want to read more, to learn more, and instead are given a short paragraph on where and how to visit and then rushed off to the next entry. There is something vaster here, something that Church should seriously consider, the potential for a book that is equal parts John Berendt and Stewart Holbrook. Yet, is this sense of "not quite enough" exactly the point? In some ways, by leaving the reader wanting more, the reader is also left wanting to fill in the missing pieces themselves by visiting. In that, we can almost forgive the missed opportunities of a straight prose work.
As a guidebook, however, the work is equally difficult to peg down. Church isn't going for comprehensive, but instead for the ways of visiting towns that he views as most authentic to place. In Mount Angel, for example, the bulk of the entry involves the experience of staying at the Benedictine Abbey in town. There's nothing wrong with this, except that it places the book more into the tradition of travel writing than of a guidebook. Further, there's a deeper issue revolving around the author's methodology of finding authentic rather than touristy small towns. His advice for knowing a small town partly relies on the same questionable mechanism as tourist towns do, like the visitor's center. Other staples of local place that Church advocates are the local diner's bulletin board or attending a local school sports function. There may have been a time when these suggestions would reveal a fully realized small town community, but if so it hasn't been in this reviewer's admittedly young life.
The book is a standard trade paperback guidebook, well executed and business-like with an attractive color cover. It feels fine to flip through, and will likely not begin to fall apart until many years past it becoming obsolete. With no photographs and only a few maps, there's little to complain about.
Overall, Discovering Main Street is a solid book with interesting stories and useful information for the traveller seeking something other than the usual over-advertised tourist traps. Although not a fully realized guidebook nor a true work of prose, Foster Church's writing is eloquent and occasionally beautiful in its own right, and the ways that he recommends visiting these towns are refreshing. The book will prove interesting to anyone who remembers the invaluable works of Thomas Friedman and is seeking a more contemporary offering.
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In the late Winter of 1910, the largest avalanche disaster in the history of North America struck the tiny railroad town of Wellington, Washington, perched in the Cascade Range. One hundred people died, and the tragedy remains unsurpassed to this day. The cause, according to an inquest held later that year, was determined to be "vis major", an act of God. Afterwards, the Great Northern Railway abolished the station name of Wellington from its timetable, hoping to eliminate the memory of the disaster from the minds of passengers on the line. The story, however, lived on, becoming a source of legend about the power and danger of the high Cascades. Photographer Martin Burwash is not the first person to write about these events of 1910 -- guidebooks to the region often contain thumbnail accounts of the tragedy, while more recently Gary Krist dedicated an entire volume to it -- but he may be the author who comes closest to bringing a reader to understand the experience. To do this, Burwash worked within the tradition of Jeff Shaara and Patrick O'Brien, and delivered to the world his life's work, the historical novel Vis Major.
The book starts with a brief author's note, discussing the actual event and noting that this novel is the author's attempt to tell the story of the men who lived through or died in the snow slide. After this short note, the novel begins. The book is organized into a series of chapters, each following one character for the duration of the chapter. Overall it is an effective device, allowing the reader to gain an understanding of the events from multiple perspectives without sacrificing the human point-of-view. The subject matter -- an obscure event in the insular context of a railroad from the often forgotten past -- is in great danger of being difficult to access. Burwash largely succeeds in avoiding this problem, restraining from overuse of insider technical terms as well as staying away from lengthy esoteric descriptions. Instead, the author strikes a good balance of minimal terminology and the use of context to orient the reader.
The book has a lengthy narrative pace, and this seems to be a deliberate choice made by the author. Although we get only a few key days in the Fall of 1909, once the fateful storm of 1910 strikes the mountains, we follow nearly every move made by the men, day by day, step by step. Burwash has made many public comments about his dedication to doing justice to the men who endured and in some cases lost their lives in this tragic event, and it is no doubt this historian side of the author that is manifested in this narrative choice. Much of the events of the story were pieced together through research and the records of the inquest that took place in 1910. Although the dialogue in the novel is imagined, the movement and actions of the characters are as accurate as the author was able to piece together from the records, as stated in the author's note at the book's beginning. The result is generally positive. While the book feels too long both figuratively and literally -- it weighs over a pound and a half! -- the pace of the narrative is a bit like a horse galloping, and is difficult to resist.
Although Burwash's first novel, Vis Major shows little signs of it. The biggest weakness of the novel is likely it's length, as mentioned above. This said, the reader never feels their time is wasted, and the overall effect is to become accustomed to the characters. There are, perhaps, a few too many instances of Burwash trying to put us in the thoughts of the characters, (invariably indicated by italics,) thus using exposition when description might have proven more effective. This said, by placing us on the shoulders of the men (and women) of Wellington, the reader gets a highly sensory ride. We get to know the isolated community of Wellington, the passengers of two stranded passenger trains, and the workers of the Great Northern Railway. Most of all, we get to experience as if firsthand the valiant, frustrating, and ultimately futile battle of the rotary snowplows and their crews as they attempt to keep Wellington connected to the outside world. When the reader finally reaches the penultimate tragedy, the hairs will very nearly stand on the back of their neck.
Following the novel, Burwash provides an epilogue discussing what became of the main survivors, and then includes a list of the GN's men who were caught in it, noting who lived, who were injured, and who died. Given that the novel is based around a true story, the book would have benefited from a slightly longer epilogue with a bit more detail. Finally, a brief statement of acknowledgements closes out the book.
The fit and finish of Vis Major is very professional. The book is quite hefty but it feels good to hold when reading. Cover stock and paper quality feel standard for a trade paperback, and the typesetting and layout is professional. Considering that iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher, this is far more than I would expect to see. The biggest question might be, is it worth the price? Even for such a hefty book, thirty dollars seems a bit steep. In the end, however, what you pay a premium for is not the physicality of the book, but the content. (Would Vis Major have seen print through traditional publishing houses? In these days of increasingly thin margins on published material, it is an unknown.) For me, the question was simple: it was worth an extra $5 or so to have a book with rare and interesting content and production values that felt professional. [Note: a hardbound version is also available. The paperback version was used for this review.]
Overall, Vis Major is an effective vehicle for telling the story of the Wellington disaster. Burwash's passion for the human aspects of this story ring through in the text, in some cases making the novel feel more like creative nonfiction in the tradition of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. The book will prove of interest to readers of historical fiction, as well as those interested in the Great Northern Railway, the history of the North Cascades, or the futility of attempting to fight nature.
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The transitory nature of art has always been fascinating. Photographs can fade, negatives can stiffen and crack and slides can succumb to color shifts and mildew. Sculptures fair little better; it has been suggested that the features on the statues of St. Mark's Square in Venice have softened over the years, eroding away from acidic rainfall. And paintings? Even in the care of the greatest museums, many of the masters of the Renaissance onwards have developed crackled surfaces. The resulting revealed lower layers of paint are known as pentimento, but they are not confined to great canvases in the museum halls of Europe. In Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland's Lost and Found Carousel Art, photographer Jim Lommasson explores an example of this effect on a Portland landmark, the carousel at the Oaks Park amusement park. The results, far from trivial, create a fascinating juxtaposition of Edwardian and Mid-Century cultures, as well as provide a unique encapsulation of the temporal nature of the arts.
Lommasson's book is almost the result of an accident. During an assignment from a photography class in 1970, the photographer noted that the paintings on the central pillar of the carousel at the Oaks were peeling away, the victim of age, exposure to elements, and occasional flood waters. Lommasson only shot a single frame in black-and-white, but he returned to the Oaks over a decade later and recorded all the central panels, this time in color. It was a prescient decision: a few short years later, the panels were "restored" to their scenes of northwest scenery by a local painting club, covering over the Edwardian imagery that had been bleeding through in the pentimento.
The slim volume opens up with an introduction by journalist Inara Verzemnieks, who writes lyrically about the nature of time and art. She describes the roots of the park as a competitor to the Lewis & Clark Exposition of 1905, a place of excitement and perhaps moral danger, where young women would cozy up to young men in the darkness and be frowned upon by the local clergy for so doing. The original paintings on the carousel mimic this somewhat naive sense of adventure, with Arabian sheiks on camels, befeathered Indian chiefs, and beautiful women exhibiting a range of behaviors from stately and elegant (strolling under a parasol) to scandalous (can-can- dancing). By the 1940s, such images were dated and old fashioned, and the park had them covered over with scenic vistas of the Columbia Gorge and other northwest scenes, all far more family friendly and far more in keeping with the highway-centric provincial boosterism notions of the era. Yet, as the surface images degraded, they began to merge with the lower layers, almost as if they were interacting with each other, a process that Verzemnieks relates in a haunting way.
Following the excellent introduction, Lommasson provides a short text describing how and why he shot the images of the carousel's central riding panels, and then come the 18 large color plates. The most striking image is perhaps that of the woman with a parasol, with the Columbia Gorge Highway circling about her legs leading to the Vista House located rather provocatively between her thighs. It is such a strange image, almost like an intentional double-exposure on film, and yet, there was no artist for these images. Yes, there were the artists who painted the original panel of the woman, and also two later artists -- the eccentric Chase brothers -- who painted the scene of the highway and river. But who painted this image, this amalgamation? Time, nature, God? No human hand with intent created this image. For that matter, is the art in question here the painted panels themselves, or Lommasson's photographs? Who is the artist, and what is the art? The lines all blur here in ways that are similar to graffiti art. Everything about the panels is provocative.
The book wraps up with an afterword by art historian Prudence Roberts. Roberts tells the story of the panels, from their creation by anonymous immigrant artistis at the carousel factor in 1912 to their repainting by off-beat brothers Waldo Spore and William Corbin Chase. The Chases were painters and wood-block printers, part of the larger arts-and-crafts movement. They were also highly unconventional, living for a time in a teepee in the woods of Western Washington State. The text is accompanied by images of the park and works of the talented Chase brothers.
Overall, the book succeeds in placing the carousel panels in a much larger context of art and regional culture. The texts are rich, and the images largely thought provoking. If I had any critical comments, it would be that there is not enough. I would have welcomed more information on the chases, as well as on the original anonymous painters who created the Edwardian imagery. Then again, in the words of circus promoter P. T. Barnum, who would no doubt have felt at home at a place like the Oaks, "always leave them wanting more."
The book is the typically shelf-awkward size that photography and art books assume, and it also feels rather slim. This makes it seem, at first glance, a bit pricey for its size. Although time spent pouring over the work ought to dismiss those concerns, it does remain slim enough that it just doesn't feel good to hold in your lap and flip through. I always felt like the book was awkward and wanting to slip from my hands or lose its dust jacket. It is far easier to view set on a table top, and while that's probably the recommended way to view any book of art or photography, I really like to relax in a nice chair with my books, and with Pentimento you just can't do that. The images themselves are all crisp and the entire book is printed on a thick, high quality paper with a satin sheen to it.
Pentimento is a volume that explores history, artistic philosophy, and Pacific Northwest culture through a unique lens. It is far more than a book about an amusement park ride. It should prove valuable to those interested in the esoterica of Portland history, as well as those with a passion for documentary photography and painting in general.
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One of the last things the world likely needs is a photo book on the Columbia River Gorge. This scenic area, with its numerous waterfalls, mountains, scenic vistas, and easy freeway access is probably the most over-photographed region of the Pacific Northwest. One might be pressed to say that there is nothing new left to see. And you'd be right -- but there is a lot left to see that is old, as is proved by the release of Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957.
Wild Beauty places the history of photography in the Gorge at the forefront. The compilers have chosen the period of 1867 to 1957 as their focus, the latter being the date when The Dalles Dam flooded Celilo Falls. The book opens with a broad essay on the river's geological and anthropological history, and the subsequent attempts to use tools of the "industrial revolution" such a photography to record those things. It's a good overview of what the book hopes to illustrate, if a bit over-familiar to the Pacific Northwest reader. The most valuable segment of this text is contained in its last two pages, where we meet some of the Gorge's earliest photographers, such as Joseph Bucthel and Carleton Watkins.
While Buchtel's work is considered to be "unimpressive", Watkins' work is the entirety of the first of five sections of plates in the book. It's a wise and fitting choice, as Watkins is a skilled artist, a man who had cut his teeth making the photographs of Yosemite that would convince Congress to save it as the first national park. It is a miracle that as many prints as shown in the book even exist; the authors point out that many of his glass plate negatives were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Watkins brings his skills to bear on the Columbia Gorge, making images at a time of great transition. Sure, the book's title suggests an emphasis on natural beauty, yet what we see even in these, the earliest photographs of the work is the firm hand of man, altering the landscape. While some of the images will prove familiar, but as local historian Dan Haneckow pointed out to me, others are more obscure or bear re-examination. A prime example of this is Plate 6, a moderately familiar image of one of the old portage railroads during the 1860s. Look closely at the back, however, and you discover a flatcar carrying a Conestoga wagon as used on the Oregon Trail. Was this a late part of the great migration, taking advantage of a more modern alternative to risking the rapids or taking the long and rough Barlow Road? If so, it's a rare glimpse indeed.
Watkins brings us these gems of zeitgeist, but he is not simply a documentary man. Many of his images have a sensitivity and an artistic composition that makes them excellent even today. Their sharpness, their haunting familiarity makes them seem recent rather than distant. This is but the first of many times a reader will find themselves staring into the distant past and yet feeling intimate with it, as if what has changed, great as the changes have been, is less than what is the same.
The next section deals with the images of various local commercial photographers who followed in Watkins' footsteps. The subject matter these photographers chose to shoot tended to concentrate on the more intimate scale of the Gorge, and here we see some of the first images of the native population. It is here where we first glimpse Celilo as a force of nature, rather than an impediment to trade. There are surprises here too, like the great sand dunes that used to lurk on the east side of The Dalles, or vast seas of Canadian ice. A few hand-tinted images pop through, but primarily we are still given monochromes of various tints.
Section three concentrates on the rise of a new phenomenon: the amateur. Thanks to the advances of technology, photography by the turn of the twentieth century was becoming almost common. For the first time it was now possible for someone who was not a professional (or a very very eccentric amateur) to make photographs. Most notably, the two amateurs that the compilers show us are different in yet another way: they are Lily White and Sarah Ladd, women. Professionals had been an all male bastion, but the amateur photography movement gave women something more meaningful to do other than paint china plates or embroider. Yet White & Ladd were not just random photographers in the wilds; they were connected enough in the growing intellectual photography circles that they were members of Alfred Stieglitz's inner circle. Their images are peculiarly timeless, feeling not far removed from images made in our own time. The cause is uncertain -- perhaps it is a certain sharpness and a scope that is not nearly so sweeping as the earlier panorama-mania. Perhaps, too, we see here the first technically proficient pedestrian imagery of the Gorge, the great-grandmother of every amateur's weekend snapshots.
Section four deals with perhaps one of the most familiar aspects of Gorge photography, the tourism oriented image. These photographs were made primarily by commercial photographers for the railroads and the highway promoters. Here are the photographic legends of the area, including the iconic views of waterfalls, scenic highway viaducts, and the view from Crown Point. It is during this time that the modern scenic Columbia River Gorge -- thanks largely to the photographers who promoted it -- acquires its classic identity. No longer is the region a somewhat frightening place, a place of hardship and travail, but instead it is a playground, a quick drive from your suburban bungalow at a bracing 35 miles-per-hour in your Model T. Many of the images are further "gilded" through garish hand coloring.
If such boosterism seems to cheapen the river, the next and final section of the book is the most tragic of all. Titled "The Engineered River", this segment delivers to us in stunning visual images the return of the river to a cruder understanding. The water now is no more than an unharnessed power source, something to be exploited for human advancement. In some ways, however, the images we see here of dynamiting channels, the construction of great concrete dams, and the burial of cultural treasures has more in common with than different from each of the previous understandings of the Gorge; each saw it as a resource to be utilized, whether for transportation, tourism dollars, or energy. From a photographic standpoint, this chapter contains two new developments, the first being the use of true color imagery. The second and perhaps more complex development is the aerial photograph, further detaching the viewer from reality on the ground. It is perhaps appropriate for a time when men tried to drastically alter the river that their point-of-view f choice was from the height of a God's eye view.
The book closes with little further commentary. A brief (one page) epilogue is included, and following this are plate listings (but without thumbnails), notes, and acknowledgments. The latter is lengthy: many of the images scene in the book are from private collectors and have never been seen in public or print before.
Visually, the content of this book is exceptionally good. There are many remarkable plates and they are presented in a logical order that makes their context more evident, both as indicators of how the Columbia Gorge was framed and viewed, as well as how landscape photography developed and grew. That said, the book is not without faults. The introduction, although able, is dry and does not give much of a feel for the flavor of the Gorge; an essay by a writer of regional or topical relevance would have been most welcome. This is even more the case for the epilogue, which felt far too short and left me wanting more.
Fit and finish on the book is excellent. Some other reviews have noted missing pages or other assembly problems; this reviewer's copy had no such defects. This book is hefty -- you could use it as a weapon if needed. It is perhaps as large as was practical to make it, but sometimes you do wish it could have been bigger, for yet more detail in the images. That said, image reproduction is high quality.
I'm tempted to simply give this book an outright recommendation and say to you "you must buy it". However, as I alluded to in the beginning of this review, I have qualms about yet another photography book on the Columbia River Gorge. Does the world need another? More importantly, do you need this one? It is against this skepticism that I come out with the answer, yes, you do. If you are a follower of regional landscape photography, then this book, more than any other, is essential to understanding the nature of the medium. The book has the right balance of historical overview, context, and precious images. If you want a discount coffee table book to send your distant relatives, so they can understand where you live, this is not your book. Rather, Wild Beauty is a chronicle of the inter-relationship between photography and the Columbia Gorge, and thus a must-have for the bookshelf of any serious regional landscape photographer, or followers of the same.
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Steam: An Enduring Legacy: The Railroad Photographs of Joel Jensen by Joel Jensen
Alexander Craghead, October 17, 2011
The railroad, and especially the steam locomotive, has been profound to the American culture. Especially in the Western regions of the U.S., where the railroad was integral to the development of modern civilization, the steam locomotive’s memory lives on in the collective imagination, despite the fact that the such machines ceased to be a meaningful force in the region’s economy more than half a century ago. Their endurance has something to do with their now foreign technological nature -- they are devices with their workings on the outside, crude yet elegant mechanical marvels that seem to breathe, seem to have a pulse, seem to be alive. Across the country, dozens upon dozens of steam locomotives survive in working order, cared for by loving and often unpaid crews, and run on numerous tourist and museum railroads. Many photo books on this subjects have been published -- the steam locomotive with its built-in special effects is a sort-of camera magnet, after all -- but few manage to rise beyond being overwrought photo albums. There is always something slightly treacly, slightly forced about these books, possibly because there is often something of the same nature in their subjects, a feeling of canned history. Yet somehow, Joel Jensen has created a work that surpasses these, a book that shows us preserved steam as merely a continuation of an unbroken tradition going back to the workaday, pre-digital world. In Steam: An Enduring Legacy, Jensen gives us not only a glimpse into a harder, grittier, sweatier side of preserved steam, but also a work of excellent photography that stands as an artistic achievement in its own right.The book is not a guidebook but an extended photographic journey through the survivors of the steam era. It begins with an essay by writer-photographer Scott Lothes, who provides a brief introduction to the cultural importance of the steam locomotive. The essay tells us the basics, but to anyone with knowledge of railroad history it will provide little new; clearly this is meant as a primer for the uninitiated, and it serves this job well. Following this, the bulk of the photographs appear in a gallery section. There is no set sequence, with the subjects bouncing back and forth through time and geography. Most of these images are displayed one-per-page, with healthy white margins at all sides. After the photograph section of the book is another essay, this time by John Gruber, founder and president of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. Gruber relates an overview of preservation and the steam locomotive, including some interesting tidbits about early, 19th century preservation movements and an able survey of contemporary efforts. He completes his essay with an overview of photography’s relationship with the preserved steam locomotive. An afterword penned by photographer Jeff Brouws follows, with an apt assessment of Jensen’s photographic style. A page of acknowledgements from Jensen complete the work.
I am intimately familiar with the tourist and heritage railway world, and so, despite my respect for the photographer and the authors, I was not anticipating this book to be particularly impressive. Aiding me in this pre-judgement was my familiarity with other works on this subject, as described above. I could not, in the end, have been more wrong. This work is a success that it transcends subject matter interest, and would serve to appeal even to the least nostalgic of railroad enthusiasts, if only they can be convinced to pick it up and look through it past its opening pages.
For these first few pages in, it is all billowing steam and dramatic light, and one might begin to fear that this will be yet one more album in the tradition of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, pleasant in a strawberry milkshake sort of way but not particularly memorable in its own right. It’s not that these dramatic images are bad: they are neither technically nor artistically flawed, but they are also of a genre that is not unfamiliar. But then, on page 22, it all changes in a characteristic Jensen fashion. The photo here, of two large steam locomotives and their long train of passenger cars silhoutted against a damp sky, is one of my favorites from this photographer, and I am disappointed at how small that the image runs in this book; nevertheless it breaks through the romantic bombast and begins a pattern of complex variety that marks this book as something special. Opposite this image is another fine stand-out, an image showing the roughshod nature of narrow gauge railroads, with a wandering pair of steel rails, barely any ties showing, splayed out through a ramshackle landscape, a tiny locomotive working hard to traverse the route. All darks and midtones, with barely a fleck of highlight anywhere, the image is teeth-gnashing and evocative.
The human aspect of these survivors is not neglected, and may in fact be one of the volume’s chief strengths. The careful inclusion of crewmen and other workers is a key aspect of this book’s DNA. From trackworkers hammering in spikes, to groundlings passing hand signals, to roundhouse monkeys wrestling with the oversize parts of these steel behemoths, people are a subtle but integral part to the visual story Jensen lays out for us. Sometimes they are ghostly figures, caught at work amidst the steam, while at other times, such as with a Durango and Silverton crew shown in a photo on page 57, they are cocky, defensive, weary, and proud, staring straight at the camera for a portrait the likes of which is as old as the relationship between the steam locomotive and cameras. Other similarly successful images include a portrait of a crewman for the ATSF 3751 on page 81, a Mount Rainier Scenic engineer on page 124, and mechanical workers from the Durango on 134 and 159. In some cases, these people wear the clothes of railroaders and shop workers for a century, bibs and long-sleeved work shirts and hard steel-toed boots, but in others they sport plastic hard hats and, in the case of the last of these images, modern wrap-around sunglasses. Often, photographers of contemporary steam seek to exclude such modern details, to try and recreate some sense of what they think the past was like, favoring costumes and playacting. Jensen here rejects this, and comes out with material that is intensely modern yet intensely authentic in ways that those seeking the Colonial Williamsburg of steam railroading always fail to achieve. These men look like the railroaders of the past because they are the railroaders of the past, and things like modern sunglasses don’t break the effect because such little trappings cannot contradict authenticity.
Failings? Few. One minor quibble is that the book is exclusively western material, but the book does not anywhere openly acknowledge this regional focus. This said, the book is subtitled as “the railroad photographs of Joel Jensen,” and Joel is a creature of the West, a photographer who is constantly roaming, constantly alone, and who sees the world through different eyes. And in the end, the artistic achievement of the photographer’s work makes complaints about his geographic biases seem trivial.
Overall production values are high, as one would expect in a book from a leading publisher such as Norton. That said, there are a few minor quibbles. The paper seems a tad thinner than I am used to expecting in such a book, so that when darker images are followed by a large white space on the next page, a very faint ghost can be read through the paper. It is, however, barely perceptible, and did not significantly detract from my enjoyment of the book. As for the photos themselves, reproduction is generally of high quality. There are times when I expected more shadow detail, but this is a common failing of black-and-white reproduction in printed matter, and overall Norton has done a great job with this. My only significant quibble with reproduction is with some of the larger images displayed across the gutter; a few, such as the image of an ATSF steam engine passing behind a graveyard on pages 70 and 71, appear rather soft, as if the prints had been scanned and then displayed larger than their original size.
This book at the end of the day is not at all about what it will be labelled as: it is not a photography book about tourist and heritage steam railroads. Instead, it is a book about undying tradition. No work has ever made contemporary steam more noble, more enviable, or harder work. The contradictions and anachronisms of these surviving steam locomotives and the crew that care for them are captured nakedly in Jensen’s photos, showing us something precious, something that is not at all playacting, but instead an unbroken thread to the relationship between man and steam that began on this continent in Antebellum times. This book will be of especial interest to those who appreciate steam locomotives, the interplay of railroads and geography, and the photography of railroads.
Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest by Foster Church
Alexander Craghead, September 13, 2010
Although the Northwest boasts three major metropolitan regions -- Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland -- it is the small town that most defines the character of the region. With sparse populations, vast agricultural regions, and a legacy of resource based economics, the town (and sometimes, failed town) dots the landscape with regularity. In the post-industrial world, many of these towns have replaced their old ways of life with tourism, and few now would ever remember that a place such as Seaside, Oregon, for example, was once a timber town instead of a taffy town. Yet for every milltown turned tourist trap, there's a half dozen that remain truer to their heritages, and it is these more authentic and less famous towns of the Northwest that Foster Church has packed into his guidebook, Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest.Church intends the book as a true guidebook, as with the dozens and dozens seen in the travel or regional sections of our area bookstores. Unlike many of these contemporaries, however, Church's volume aims at something more akin to authenticity. Explicit in the beginning is the admonition to treat visiting small towns differently, as the author exhorts the virtues of visiting the local Chamber of Commerce, reading the local paper, and eating breakfast in the local diner as ways to learn the local culture. A requirement of any town he has included is the provision of lodging; Church argues that a town that seems at first sleepy and passed-by will reveal itself better to a traveller the next morning.
Following a brief introduction in which the author lays out these arguments, the book is divided into five chapters, each corresponding to a specific region of the Northwest: the Willamette Valley, the Oregon Coast, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Washington. The bulk of Washington and the entirety of Idaho are excluded from the book, much less other states (or provinces) that have traditionally been described as Northwestern. This is perhaps understandable given that Church was a staff writer at the Portland Oregonian for over twenty years and is likely most familiar with Oregon towns or towns within a short drive of Portland, but the lack is noticeable and unfortunate, at a minimum bringing the choice of title into question. Within each chapter is an entry on a small town. In railroad fashion, the town name is followed by its elevation. Next comes a brief paragraph describing the road to the town; perhaps reflecting the author's interest in off-beat locations, all of the towns in the book but one (White Salmon, WA) are reachable only by road, although the presence of transit options is an unspoken likelihood. The bulk of the entry then consists of a short, generally narrative text describing a typical visit. The entry is then bookended by a single paragraph describing what Church terms "the basics" of lodging and dining. In all, 48 towns are covered. Following the entries is a brief epilogue and an index.
The author has walked a very fine line with this book. Although organized and promoted as a guidebook, Church gives us more a collection of small narratives, like a journalist encyclopedia of place. The writing is solid, verging on poetic at times with an occasional turn of phrase flashing through like agates on a sandy beach. Read as narrative, the book can almost be frustrating, as you want to read more, to learn more, and instead are given a short paragraph on where and how to visit and then rushed off to the next entry. There is something vaster here, something that Church should seriously consider, the potential for a book that is equal parts John Berendt and Stewart Holbrook. Yet, is this sense of "not quite enough" exactly the point? In some ways, by leaving the reader wanting more, the reader is also left wanting to fill in the missing pieces themselves by visiting. In that, we can almost forgive the missed opportunities of a straight prose work.
As a guidebook, however, the work is equally difficult to peg down. Church isn't going for comprehensive, but instead for the ways of visiting towns that he views as most authentic to place. In Mount Angel, for example, the bulk of the entry involves the experience of staying at the Benedictine Abbey in town. There's nothing wrong with this, except that it places the book more into the tradition of travel writing than of a guidebook. Further, there's a deeper issue revolving around the author's methodology of finding authentic rather than touristy small towns. His advice for knowing a small town partly relies on the same questionable mechanism as tourist towns do, like the visitor's center. Other staples of local place that Church advocates are the local diner's bulletin board or attending a local school sports function. There may have been a time when these suggestions would reveal a fully realized small town community, but if so it hasn't been in this reviewer's admittedly young life.
The book is a standard trade paperback guidebook, well executed and business-like with an attractive color cover. It feels fine to flip through, and will likely not begin to fall apart until many years past it becoming obsolete. With no photographs and only a few maps, there's little to complain about.
Overall, Discovering Main Street is a solid book with interesting stories and useful information for the traveller seeking something other than the usual over-advertised tourist traps. Although not a fully realized guidebook nor a true work of prose, Foster Church's writing is eloquent and occasionally beautiful in its own right, and the ways that he recommends visiting these towns are refreshing. The book will prove interesting to anyone who remembers the invaluable works of Thomas Friedman and is seeking a more contemporary offering.
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VIS Major: Railroad Men, an 'Act of God'-White Death at Wellington by Burwash Martin Burwash
Alexander Craghead, January 10, 2010
In the late Winter of 1910, the largest avalanche disaster in the history of North America struck the tiny railroad town of Wellington, Washington, perched in the Cascade Range. One hundred people died, and the tragedy remains unsurpassed to this day. The cause, according to an inquest held later that year, was determined to be "vis major", an act of God. Afterwards, the Great Northern Railway abolished the station name of Wellington from its timetable, hoping to eliminate the memory of the disaster from the minds of passengers on the line. The story, however, lived on, becoming a source of legend about the power and danger of the high Cascades. Photographer Martin Burwash is not the first person to write about these events of 1910 -- guidebooks to the region often contain thumbnail accounts of the tragedy, while more recently Gary Krist dedicated an entire volume to it -- but he may be the author who comes closest to bringing a reader to understand the experience. To do this, Burwash worked within the tradition of Jeff Shaara and Patrick O'Brien, and delivered to the world his life's work, the historical novel Vis Major.The book starts with a brief author's note, discussing the actual event and noting that this novel is the author's attempt to tell the story of the men who lived through or died in the snow slide. After this short note, the novel begins. The book is organized into a series of chapters, each following one character for the duration of the chapter. Overall it is an effective device, allowing the reader to gain an understanding of the events from multiple perspectives without sacrificing the human point-of-view. The subject matter -- an obscure event in the insular context of a railroad from the often forgotten past -- is in great danger of being difficult to access. Burwash largely succeeds in avoiding this problem, restraining from overuse of insider technical terms as well as staying away from lengthy esoteric descriptions. Instead, the author strikes a good balance of minimal terminology and the use of context to orient the reader.
The book has a lengthy narrative pace, and this seems to be a deliberate choice made by the author. Although we get only a few key days in the Fall of 1909, once the fateful storm of 1910 strikes the mountains, we follow nearly every move made by the men, day by day, step by step. Burwash has made many public comments about his dedication to doing justice to the men who endured and in some cases lost their lives in this tragic event, and it is no doubt this historian side of the author that is manifested in this narrative choice. Much of the events of the story were pieced together through research and the records of the inquest that took place in 1910. Although the dialogue in the novel is imagined, the movement and actions of the characters are as accurate as the author was able to piece together from the records, as stated in the author's note at the book's beginning. The result is generally positive. While the book feels too long both figuratively and literally -- it weighs over a pound and a half! -- the pace of the narrative is a bit like a horse galloping, and is difficult to resist.
Although Burwash's first novel, Vis Major shows little signs of it. The biggest weakness of the novel is likely it's length, as mentioned above. This said, the reader never feels their time is wasted, and the overall effect is to become accustomed to the characters. There are, perhaps, a few too many instances of Burwash trying to put us in the thoughts of the characters, (invariably indicated by italics,) thus using exposition when description might have proven more effective. This said, by placing us on the shoulders of the men (and women) of Wellington, the reader gets a highly sensory ride. We get to know the isolated community of Wellington, the passengers of two stranded passenger trains, and the workers of the Great Northern Railway. Most of all, we get to experience as if firsthand the valiant, frustrating, and ultimately futile battle of the rotary snowplows and their crews as they attempt to keep Wellington connected to the outside world. When the reader finally reaches the penultimate tragedy, the hairs will very nearly stand on the back of their neck.
Following the novel, Burwash provides an epilogue discussing what became of the main survivors, and then includes a list of the GN's men who were caught in it, noting who lived, who were injured, and who died. Given that the novel is based around a true story, the book would have benefited from a slightly longer epilogue with a bit more detail. Finally, a brief statement of acknowledgements closes out the book.
The fit and finish of Vis Major is very professional. The book is quite hefty but it feels good to hold when reading. Cover stock and paper quality feel standard for a trade paperback, and the typesetting and layout is professional. Considering that iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher, this is far more than I would expect to see. The biggest question might be, is it worth the price? Even for such a hefty book, thirty dollars seems a bit steep. In the end, however, what you pay a premium for is not the physicality of the book, but the content. (Would Vis Major have seen print through traditional publishing houses? In these days of increasingly thin margins on published material, it is an unknown.) For me, the question was simple: it was worth an extra $5 or so to have a book with rare and interesting content and production values that felt professional. [Note: a hardbound version is also available. The paperback version was used for this review.]
Overall, Vis Major is an effective vehicle for telling the story of the Wellington disaster. Burwash's passion for the human aspects of this story ring through in the text, in some cases making the novel feel more like creative nonfiction in the tradition of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. The book will prove of interest to readers of historical fiction, as well as those interested in the Great Northern Railway, the history of the North Cascades, or the futility of attempting to fight nature.
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Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland's Lost and Found Carousel Art by Jim Lommasson
Alexander Craghead, January 10, 2010
The transitory nature of art has always been fascinating. Photographs can fade, negatives can stiffen and crack and slides can succumb to color shifts and mildew. Sculptures fair little better; it has been suggested that the features on the statues of St. Mark's Square in Venice have softened over the years, eroding away from acidic rainfall. And paintings? Even in the care of the greatest museums, many of the masters of the Renaissance onwards have developed crackled surfaces. The resulting revealed lower layers of paint are known as pentimento, but they are not confined to great canvases in the museum halls of Europe. In Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland's Lost and Found Carousel Art, photographer Jim Lommasson explores an example of this effect on a Portland landmark, the carousel at the Oaks Park amusement park. The results, far from trivial, create a fascinating juxtaposition of Edwardian and Mid-Century cultures, as well as provide a unique encapsulation of the temporal nature of the arts.Lommasson's book is almost the result of an accident. During an assignment from a photography class in 1970, the photographer noted that the paintings on the central pillar of the carousel at the Oaks were peeling away, the victim of age, exposure to elements, and occasional flood waters. Lommasson only shot a single frame in black-and-white, but he returned to the Oaks over a decade later and recorded all the central panels, this time in color. It was a prescient decision: a few short years later, the panels were "restored" to their scenes of northwest scenery by a local painting club, covering over the Edwardian imagery that had been bleeding through in the pentimento.
The slim volume opens up with an introduction by journalist Inara Verzemnieks, who writes lyrically about the nature of time and art. She describes the roots of the park as a competitor to the Lewis & Clark Exposition of 1905, a place of excitement and perhaps moral danger, where young women would cozy up to young men in the darkness and be frowned upon by the local clergy for so doing. The original paintings on the carousel mimic this somewhat naive sense of adventure, with Arabian sheiks on camels, befeathered Indian chiefs, and beautiful women exhibiting a range of behaviors from stately and elegant (strolling under a parasol) to scandalous (can-can- dancing). By the 1940s, such images were dated and old fashioned, and the park had them covered over with scenic vistas of the Columbia Gorge and other northwest scenes, all far more family friendly and far more in keeping with the highway-centric provincial boosterism notions of the era. Yet, as the surface images degraded, they began to merge with the lower layers, almost as if they were interacting with each other, a process that Verzemnieks relates in a haunting way.
Following the excellent introduction, Lommasson provides a short text describing how and why he shot the images of the carousel's central riding panels, and then come the 18 large color plates. The most striking image is perhaps that of the woman with a parasol, with the Columbia Gorge Highway circling about her legs leading to the Vista House located rather provocatively between her thighs. It is such a strange image, almost like an intentional double-exposure on film, and yet, there was no artist for these images. Yes, there were the artists who painted the original panel of the woman, and also two later artists -- the eccentric Chase brothers -- who painted the scene of the highway and river. But who painted this image, this amalgamation? Time, nature, God? No human hand with intent created this image. For that matter, is the art in question here the painted panels themselves, or Lommasson's photographs? Who is the artist, and what is the art? The lines all blur here in ways that are similar to graffiti art. Everything about the panels is provocative.
The book wraps up with an afterword by art historian Prudence Roberts. Roberts tells the story of the panels, from their creation by anonymous immigrant artistis at the carousel factor in 1912 to their repainting by off-beat brothers Waldo Spore and William Corbin Chase. The Chases were painters and wood-block printers, part of the larger arts-and-crafts movement. They were also highly unconventional, living for a time in a teepee in the woods of Western Washington State. The text is accompanied by images of the park and works of the talented Chase brothers.
Overall, the book succeeds in placing the carousel panels in a much larger context of art and regional culture. The texts are rich, and the images largely thought provoking. If I had any critical comments, it would be that there is not enough. I would have welcomed more information on the chases, as well as on the original anonymous painters who created the Edwardian imagery. Then again, in the words of circus promoter P. T. Barnum, who would no doubt have felt at home at a place like the Oaks, "always leave them wanting more."
The book is the typically shelf-awkward size that photography and art books assume, and it also feels rather slim. This makes it seem, at first glance, a bit pricey for its size. Although time spent pouring over the work ought to dismiss those concerns, it does remain slim enough that it just doesn't feel good to hold in your lap and flip through. I always felt like the book was awkward and wanting to slip from my hands or lose its dust jacket. It is far easier to view set on a table top, and while that's probably the recommended way to view any book of art or photography, I really like to relax in a nice chair with my books, and with Pentimento you just can't do that. The images themselves are all crisp and the entire book is printed on a thick, high quality paper with a satin sheen to it.
Pentimento is a volume that explores history, artistic philosophy, and Pacific Northwest culture through a unique lens. It is far more than a book about an amusement park ride. It should prove valuable to those interested in the esoterica of Portland history, as well as those with a passion for documentary photography and painting in general.
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Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957 (Northwest Photography) by Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen
Alexander Craghead, December 22, 2008
One of the last things the world likely needs is a photo book on the Columbia River Gorge. This scenic area, with its numerous waterfalls, mountains, scenic vistas, and easy freeway access is probably the most over-photographed region of the Pacific Northwest. One might be pressed to say that there is nothing new left to see. And you'd be right -- but there is a lot left to see that is old, as is proved by the release of Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957.Wild Beauty places the history of photography in the Gorge at the forefront. The compilers have chosen the period of 1867 to 1957 as their focus, the latter being the date when The Dalles Dam flooded Celilo Falls. The book opens with a broad essay on the river's geological and anthropological history, and the subsequent attempts to use tools of the "industrial revolution" such a photography to record those things. It's a good overview of what the book hopes to illustrate, if a bit over-familiar to the Pacific Northwest reader. The most valuable segment of this text is contained in its last two pages, where we meet some of the Gorge's earliest photographers, such as Joseph Bucthel and Carleton Watkins.
While Buchtel's work is considered to be "unimpressive", Watkins' work is the entirety of the first of five sections of plates in the book. It's a wise and fitting choice, as Watkins is a skilled artist, a man who had cut his teeth making the photographs of Yosemite that would convince Congress to save it as the first national park. It is a miracle that as many prints as shown in the book even exist; the authors point out that many of his glass plate negatives were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Watkins brings his skills to bear on the Columbia Gorge, making images at a time of great transition. Sure, the book's title suggests an emphasis on natural beauty, yet what we see even in these, the earliest photographs of the work is the firm hand of man, altering the landscape. While some of the images will prove familiar, but as local historian Dan Haneckow pointed out to me, others are more obscure or bear re-examination. A prime example of this is Plate 6, a moderately familiar image of one of the old portage railroads during the 1860s. Look closely at the back, however, and you discover a flatcar carrying a Conestoga wagon as used on the Oregon Trail. Was this a late part of the great migration, taking advantage of a more modern alternative to risking the rapids or taking the long and rough Barlow Road? If so, it's a rare glimpse indeed.
Watkins brings us these gems of zeitgeist, but he is not simply a documentary man. Many of his images have a sensitivity and an artistic composition that makes them excellent even today. Their sharpness, their haunting familiarity makes them seem recent rather than distant. This is but the first of many times a reader will find themselves staring into the distant past and yet feeling intimate with it, as if what has changed, great as the changes have been, is less than what is the same.
The next section deals with the images of various local commercial photographers who followed in Watkins' footsteps. The subject matter these photographers chose to shoot tended to concentrate on the more intimate scale of the Gorge, and here we see some of the first images of the native population. It is here where we first glimpse Celilo as a force of nature, rather than an impediment to trade. There are surprises here too, like the great sand dunes that used to lurk on the east side of The Dalles, or vast seas of Canadian ice. A few hand-tinted images pop through, but primarily we are still given monochromes of various tints.
Section three concentrates on the rise of a new phenomenon: the amateur. Thanks to the advances of technology, photography by the turn of the twentieth century was becoming almost common. For the first time it was now possible for someone who was not a professional (or a very very eccentric amateur) to make photographs. Most notably, the two amateurs that the compilers show us are different in yet another way: they are Lily White and Sarah Ladd, women. Professionals had been an all male bastion, but the amateur photography movement gave women something more meaningful to do other than paint china plates or embroider. Yet White & Ladd were not just random photographers in the wilds; they were connected enough in the growing intellectual photography circles that they were members of Alfred Stieglitz's inner circle. Their images are peculiarly timeless, feeling not far removed from images made in our own time. The cause is uncertain -- perhaps it is a certain sharpness and a scope that is not nearly so sweeping as the earlier panorama-mania. Perhaps, too, we see here the first technically proficient pedestrian imagery of the Gorge, the great-grandmother of every amateur's weekend snapshots.
Section four deals with perhaps one of the most familiar aspects of Gorge photography, the tourism oriented image. These photographs were made primarily by commercial photographers for the railroads and the highway promoters. Here are the photographic legends of the area, including the iconic views of waterfalls, scenic highway viaducts, and the view from Crown Point. It is during this time that the modern scenic Columbia River Gorge -- thanks largely to the photographers who promoted it -- acquires its classic identity. No longer is the region a somewhat frightening place, a place of hardship and travail, but instead it is a playground, a quick drive from your suburban bungalow at a bracing 35 miles-per-hour in your Model T. Many of the images are further "gilded" through garish hand coloring.
If such boosterism seems to cheapen the river, the next and final section of the book is the most tragic of all. Titled "The Engineered River", this segment delivers to us in stunning visual images the return of the river to a cruder understanding. The water now is no more than an unharnessed power source, something to be exploited for human advancement. In some ways, however, the images we see here of dynamiting channels, the construction of great concrete dams, and the burial of cultural treasures has more in common with than different from each of the previous understandings of the Gorge; each saw it as a resource to be utilized, whether for transportation, tourism dollars, or energy. From a photographic standpoint, this chapter contains two new developments, the first being the use of true color imagery. The second and perhaps more complex development is the aerial photograph, further detaching the viewer from reality on the ground. It is perhaps appropriate for a time when men tried to drastically alter the river that their point-of-view f choice was from the height of a God's eye view.
The book closes with little further commentary. A brief (one page) epilogue is included, and following this are plate listings (but without thumbnails), notes, and acknowledgments. The latter is lengthy: many of the images scene in the book are from private collectors and have never been seen in public or print before.
Visually, the content of this book is exceptionally good. There are many remarkable plates and they are presented in a logical order that makes their context more evident, both as indicators of how the Columbia Gorge was framed and viewed, as well as how landscape photography developed and grew. That said, the book is not without faults. The introduction, although able, is dry and does not give much of a feel for the flavor of the Gorge; an essay by a writer of regional or topical relevance would have been most welcome. This is even more the case for the epilogue, which felt far too short and left me wanting more.
Fit and finish on the book is excellent. Some other reviews have noted missing pages or other assembly problems; this reviewer's copy had no such defects. This book is hefty -- you could use it as a weapon if needed. It is perhaps as large as was practical to make it, but sometimes you do wish it could have been bigger, for yet more detail in the images. That said, image reproduction is high quality.
I'm tempted to simply give this book an outright recommendation and say to you "you must buy it". However, as I alluded to in the beginning of this review, I have qualms about yet another photography book on the Columbia River Gorge. Does the world need another? More importantly, do you need this one? It is against this skepticism that I come out with the answer, yes, you do. If you are a follower of regional landscape photography, then this book, more than any other, is essential to understanding the nature of the medium. The book has the right balance of historical overview, context, and precious images. If you want a discount coffee table book to send your distant relatives, so they can understand where you live, this is not your book. Rather, Wild Beauty is a chronicle of the inter-relationship between photography and the Columbia Gorge, and thus a must-have for the bookshelf of any serious regional landscape photographer, or followers of the same.
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