Continued from Page 9
Seeking to fill in gaps left by projects
that highlighted only the wild landscapes of
the river, McClaran began to turn his lens
on scenes of industrialization. From the out-
set of the project, he aimed to capture each
of the river’s 1,243 miles, venturing from the
sands of the Pacific to the alpine lakes of Brit-
ish Columbia, Canada, with an eye for captur-
ing both scenery and character. “It’s beautiful,
it runs through a beautiful landscape, but it’s
industrialized fully and completely, with the
exception of short sections,” McClaran said of
the river. “The idea was for all of the pictures
to reflect the impacts that humans have had on
the landscape.”
His reflection begins with an acknowledg-
ment. This life giving river was once known
by many names, including the Wihmal,
Shwan-etk-qwa and Nch’i-Wana, each refer-
ring to the “great river” that McClaran’s series
is named for. His photographs don’t shy away
from the presence of stretches with more con-
crete than forest. Some images show aban-
doned structures, processing plants or, say,
a customs checkpoint in the foreground of a
mountain vista. One frame shows a scene of
apple boxes stacked atop a cement surface
near Pateros, Washington. Another refers to a
graffiti mark along a stretch of highway as a
“modern pictograph.”
Toward the Columbia’s headwaters, one
image shows a man standing on a wide stump,
the result of a long trip down a remote log-
ging road. “That’s on Kinbasket Lake, which
is the uppermost reservoir on the Columbia,”
McClaran said, “I came into a clearing, I saw
10 // COASTWEEKEND.COM
Photos by Robbie McClaran
ABOVE: A gelatin silver print of Wáatpatukaykas, also known as Cayuse Sisters or Twin Sisters at Wallula Gap in Washington state, the ancestral
home of Umatilla, Walla Walla and Cayuse. BELOW LEFT: Campers sit by Syringa Provincial Park at Lower Arrow Lake, near Castlegar in British
Columbia, ancestral lands of the Sinixt people. BELOW MIDDLE: A man stands on a stump at Kinbasket Lake in British Columbia, the ancestral
homeland of the Secwepemc, Ktunaxa, Syilx tmix, and Sinixt people. BELOW RIGHT: A clearcut forest at Upper Arrow Lake in British Columbia.
a couple of young guys sitting around a camp-
fire,” the photographer continued, “I started
a conversation with them and that’s how that
picture came about.”
The use of large format film for the project
was both a visual and historical choice. “I’ve
always loved, in my travels around the North-
west, when you stop in a small town cafe and
they have historic photographs of that area
on the wall, typically of logging operations,”
McClaran said, adding that many of those rel-
ics were likely captured with large format
cameras.
Along the Columbia, McClaran photo-
graphed entirely in monochrome, using two
cameras with interchangeable antique lenses.
Keen on embracing the imperfections of work-
ing with an analog format, the photogra-
pher looked to the past for guidance. “Revert-
ing back to those historic photographs that
inspired me, those all had those kinds of
imperfections in them as well,” he said.
Each image, developed and printed by
McClaran, holds weight as a tangible his-
toric object. The final product, a combination
of silver gelatin contact and enlarged pigment
prints, has the presence of a lasting document.
The journey’s final image, marking the
point at which McClaran had traversed the riv-
er’s full span, was taken on a hot and dry June
day at Cayuse Sisters, Wallula Gap.
But McClaran admits that it’s difficult to
define a clear end point. “For a project like
this, it’s really hard to say, ‘I’m done,’” he
said. “There’s a few locations probably from
the lower Columbia gorge to halfway between
Portland and Astoria that I’d like to do some
additional pictures, and I may in time.”
But he’s satisfied with the result, much of it
now on display at Lightbox Photographic Gal-
lery through May 11. “I think it turned into
pretty much what I had hoped for it, which
was … to create a body of work that would
serve as an archive or a survey of the land-
scapes of the Columbia River,” he said.