October 1, 2009
By Claire Sykes
When Terry Toedtemeier collapsed from cardiac arrest on December 10, 2008, for a while there the heart of Portland and the Columbia River Gorge stopped beating, too. We were all in shock. One of our beloved—photographer, historian, scientist, curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum for a quarter of a century—was gone.
Terry was in Hood River, Oregon when he died. He and his close friend and collaborator, John Laursen had just finished giving a talk on their book, Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957. But Terry’s spirit and vision only live on in this elegant and enlightening large-format hardcover volume, published by the Northwest Photography Archive in partnership with Oregon State University Press. It features 134 images (mostly previously unpublished) from about three dozen photographers and 15 different public and private collections, one of which was Terry’s.
"Indian Summer on the Columbia" albumen silver mammoth print, 1883 (Photo by Carleton E. Watkins)
Here, John, a writer and book designer, and co-founder with Terry of the Northwest Photography Archive, talks about Wild Beauty, and the power of photographs to shape how we care and respond to the world around us.
Terry Toedtemeir and John Laursen
Claire Sykes: What did you and Terry have in mind for this book?
John Laursen: Terry and I believed that the photographs were an important part of our collective cultural heritage, and one that deserved a wider audience. We did not intend for Wild Beauty to be a “Save the Gorge” book, but we did hope that it would help to remind people of what a tremendously valuable place the Columbia River Gorge is.
CS: What is it about the book’s photographs that makes them worthy of such a fine publication?
JL: Terry’s knowledge of photography was both deep and broad, but he had a particular passion for the photographic history of the Gorge, and he had been collecting and studying these images for years. We knew that the photographs were stunning, but the prints and negatives are scattered in these different collections, and because of that and because they are for the most part both rare and fragile, the public never gets to see them, certainly not in a way that places them in a thoughtful context. Making this book was a way of bringing these fascinating images out of obscurity and into public view. And then when you gather them together, they yield a pretty coherent portrait of nearly a century of Euro-American impact on this extraordinary landscape.
CS: What was your thinking in the way you organized the presentation of the photographs in Wild Beauty?
JL: In choosing the Gorge for the Northwest Photography Archive’s first book, we were acutely aware that the history of photography there mirrors the way that this new art form was chronicling events throughout the developing West—the medium and the region in effect growing up together.
We knew that in showing how photographers saw the Gorge over that sweep of time, we were telling multiple stories—the history of the art of photography from albumen silver prints to early Kodachromes, the way that increased access to difficult terrain facilitated new photographic perspectives, the impact of development on a landscape, and so forth.
We came to realize that the most logical way to organize these images was around the interplay between the evolving art of photography and the changing transportation infrastructure in the Gorge. Wild Beauty begins just as landscape photography was really starting to come into its own. At the same time, the Columbia River Gorge and other daunting places close to cities were becoming more readily accessible.
"Mt. Hood from the Head of the Dalles" albumen silver print, 1883 (Photo by Carleton E. Watkins)
CS: The book is divided into five sections. What happens in each of them?
JL: The earliest significant photographs of the Gorge—represented in the first section of the book (1867-1885)—were made by Carleton Watkins, beginning with his first visit in 1867. Those images were necessarily created from vantages that could easily be reached traveling on the steamboat and the short portage rail routes along the river; and then, after 1882, on the rail line that ran from Portland east through the full length of the Gorge.
"Cape Horn, Columbia River" albumen silver mammoth print, 1867 (Photo by Carleton E. Watkins)
"Mitchell's Point, View Looking up the River" albumen silver print, 1883 (Photo by Carleton E. Watkins)
In the book’s second section (1885-1910), there was still no roadway through the Gorge. Most of the photographers were taking photographs from the river and rail grade, often as publicity for the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, which were promoting travel to and through the Gorge. Only the Kiser brothers, Fred and Oscar, who had grown up in the Gorge, occasionally clambered up the cliffs to achieve a higher vantage point with their cameras.
"Celilo Falls" gelatin silver print, 1907 (Photo by Benjamin A. Gifford)
"Multnomah Falls from a Point Five Miles East of Cape Horn" gelatin silver print, circa 1908 (Photo by Fred Kiser)
Lily White and Sarah Ladd, whose work is presented in the third section (1903-1905), were unique in having the leisure to spend sustained periods of time in the Gorge. Living for three summers on the Columbia, on a houseboat with a full darkroom onboard, they made photographs that are all about the seasons and the weather and the light—about the atmosphere of the place and what it feels like to be in the Gorge—rather than documenting specific features of the place itself. Their male contemporaries tended to make pictures of landmarks and big rock formations; White and Ladd, associate members of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, had a completely different sensibility.
"Gateway to the Inland Empire" platinum print, 1903-1905 (Photo by Sarah Hall Ladd)
"Evening on the Columbia" platinum print, 1903-1905 (Photo by Lily E. White)
Construction of the Columbia River Highway began in 1911. Designed by Samuel Lancaster, it was the first major paved road in the Pacific Northwest, connecting Portland to The Dalles, a distance of about 80 miles. In the fourth section of the book (1911-1929), you see for the first time a significant number of photographs looking down into the Gorge from above, instead of from the river grade looking up. Also for the first time there are pictures of waterfalls, such as Metlako Falls, that were effectively unreachable before the highway was built.
And, the highway itself was a work of art. Photographers came just to photograph its tunnels and bridges, because they were so handsome and fit so gracefully into the landscape. At the same time, technological advances in photography made it easier for amateur photographers, whose pictures joined a proliferation of professional ones, now often hand-colored for the tourist trade.
"Highway Approach to Mitchell Point" gelatin silver print, circa 1916 (Photo by Arthur M. Prentiss)
"Metlako Falls" hand-colored gelatin silver print, circa 1916 (Photo by Charles L. Winter)
The final, fifth section of Wild Beauty (1930-1957) chronicles the era when human behavior began to have a profound impact on the river itself. The Columbia River was dammed, first at Bonneville in 1933, obliterating the Cascade Rapids, and again in 1957 at The Dalles, drowning Celilo Falls, a place that for 10,000 years had been continuously fished by the native people. And for the first time, in this section we see views of the Gorge that only aerial photography can offer.
"Celilo Falls" gelatin silver print, 1935 (Photo by Alfred A. Monner)
"Untitled" gelatin silver print, 1956 (Photo by Gladys Seufert)
CS: How might Wild Beauty shape the way we experience the Gorge, whether we actually visit it or see it only in these photographs?
JL: For those of us who live in the region, the Columbia River Gorge is a familiar landscape, but now we tend to move through it very fast, on the freeway. The photographs in the book provide the opportunity to see the Gorge anew by viewing it through earlier eyes.
In some cases, you can see the exact same formations—Cape Horn in Washington and Rooster Rock in Oregon are still there, for instance—though now there’s a highway where there wasn’t before. Then there are other iconic, physical landmarks that are no longer visible, like the Cascade Rapids and Celilo Falls, both now buried beneath slack water.
Terry and I wanted Wild Beauty to be an accurate historical representation of a place and an art form. But it’s also a strong reminder of how valuable this landscape is and how others viewed it and treasured it long before you or I were ever here. Looking at these photographs, one can’t help but hope that the Columbia River Gorge continues to be prized, and protected.
"Evening View of Mitchell Point from the East" gelatin silver film negative, 1948 (Photo by Alfred A. Monner)
Co-founded by John and Terry in 2002, the Northwest Photography Archive is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is “to expand awareness of and access to the cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest through the publication of historically and artistically significant photographs.” Wild Beauty is its first volume. The book was a 2009 finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction.
The Northwest Photography Archive plans to publish a monograph of Terry’s own, extraordinary photographs of the Northwest landscape in late 2010.
© Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
