An old technology produces a new view of Columbia River

Photographer Robbie McClaran spent eight years documenting industrial impacts along the course of the river. Now his work goes on display

By Chuck Thompson. February 17, 2022. You don’t take selfies with the kind of camera Robbie McClaran uses. For starters, the thing weighs about 12 pounds.

Well, McClaran doesn’t always use a 1954 Deardorff 8×10 field camera. But the Portland-based photographer remained devoted to it—as well as a 1920s Eastman 2D—over the eight years it took to produce his new photo exhibit.

“The Great River of the West” is a photographic survey of the Columbia River from its source in the Canadian Rockies to its confluence with the Pacific.

“I hoped to produce an exhibit that would not just be a collection of pictures that’d be up on the wall and then go away,” says McClaran, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Fortune. “The idea all along was to put together a body of work that would exist in the public sphere.”

A commercial and editorial photographer, McClaran’s documentary and fine art work is held in several private and public collections, including the University of Oregon, Portland Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

A collection of more than 60 photos, “The Great River of the West” is currently on display through March 3 at the Buckley Center Gallery at the University of Portland. From there it will travel to the LightBox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, Oregon (April 9-May 2); the Moscow Contemporary, in Moscow, Idaho (June 3-Sept. 10); and the Walters Cultural Arts Center in Hillsboro, Oregon (Oct. 4-Nov. 18).

It’s not just a collection of pretty pictures. The subjects and captions present a unique view of the river’s history, inspiring contemplation and discussion that stretch far beyond the photographer’s lens.

Columbia Insight recently met with McClaran via Zoom to pose questions we had after taking in the show.

Columbia Insight: How is this project different from others that have traced the entire length of the Columbia River?

Robbie McClaran: I had seen projects that celebrated the natural beauty of the river, which is obvious and all around. But they very conspicuously cropped out the human impacts that were around the river.

I wanted each photograph to have some evidence of human impact. But I didn’t want it to be disaster porn. I didn’t want it to be, “Oh look at this horrible pollution thing.” In some of the pictures it looks like this beautiful landscape. Then you look a little closer and it’s, “Oh there’s a railroad track running through there.” Others it’s more obvious.

CI: Did this project change your view of the river?

RM: Oh, yeah. The story of Grand Coulee Dam, for example. It was extolled as this WPA project that began to save the economy and won WWII and all that’s great. But nobody really talks about the fact that it was built without fish ladders and that native salmon are now extinct up above Grand Coulee, which is still a vast stretch of river.

I only discovered just two years ago the Colville Tribe is working on a project to reintroduce salmon above Grand Coulee and doing it by trucking them around the dam. They’ve already seen some successes. That kind of thing is really exciting but also tragic and heartbreaking.

CI: There’s an emphasis on Indigenous history in the accompanying text. You make a point of naming the ancestral Tribal lands in many of the photos.

RM: That was not my initial process, to be honest. It was a process of discovery. Initially, I wanted to go see what’s the source of the Columbia River. Through that and doing research and reading historical accounts … I read the David Thompson journals and several other books. I read the Click Relander book about Native Tribes called Drummers and Dreamers.

The thing I wanted to be very careful about, I’m not a scholar of Native American history. I didn’t feel it was my place to come in and try to tell a Native story. But I did feel it was worthy of acknowledging the fact that history didn’t begin with Lewis and Clark.

CI: You associate the word Columbia with Christopher Columbus, rape, murder and slavery. Are you suggesting a reexamination of the name of the river, say, the way Mt. McKinley was officially renamed Denali in 2015?

RM: I haven’t heard any movement around that. I guess I wanted to open with that to perhaps open to the door to that thought. I think there are a lot of people who never really consider where the names of places come from.

I wanted to be a little provocative because I’d like people to think about these kinds of things. I’m more of a person that likes to propose questions rather that present my answers and solutions.

CI: The images have an antiquated look. Why?

RM: I wanted to use this antique, large-format film camera. It shoots an 8-inch-by-10-inch negative. It has an old lens that is questionably sharp and vignettes out toward the edges. It’s one of those things I just like the look of the pictures. I wanted the pictures to have this historic look and feel, but I wanted them also to look very contemporary and photograph modern constructions and things along the river.

CI: What kind of camera did you use?

RM: I actually used two different cameras for this project. For many years, and the first several years of this project, I used an Eastman 2D. I bought it at a swap meet in Portland in the mid-1990s. That camera was made in the 1920s. It had very limited movements and slowly developed other problems, light leaks, etc.

So in 2018, I “upgraded” to a Deardorff V8. The Deardorff was made in 1954. I took it to a guy in Battle Ground (Wash.) who restores these specific cameras and had it refurbished. It’s a very sweet machine. It is a far more reliable and fully functional camera than the Eastman, but I really loved the idea of using a 100-year-old camera. Still, a 65-year-old isn’t bad.

CI: Is the camera challenging to use?

RM: The camera itself is very big. It’s a big, bulky, heavy thing and requires a heavy-duty backpack to carry the camera and the film holders. A big tripod. So my kit’s about 40 pounds thrown onto my back.

Working in this format it’s not like a digital camera where you take a picture and look on the back of your camera and go, “Okay, it looks good.” With this there’s so many things that can go wrong.

Also, the film itself is really expensive. It’s about five bucks a sheet of film before I even process it. I don’t shoot a lot. Oftentimes I’ll take one, or if I’m really feeling ambitious I’ll take two.

CI: Is the area around Mica Dam in British Columbia as dramatic as it looks in your photograph?

RM: First of all, it’s a long way from anywhere. To get there you have to go to Revelstoke (BC). And then drive, geez, about 100 miles through the middle of nowhere. It’s extremely remote and then it’s just out there in the middle of nowhere and it backs up this massive Kinbasket Lake.

To take the photo there, obviously the dam itself is fenced off, but you can get pretty close to it. I was perched up, not really on a cliff ledge, but I didn’t want to go out too much further!

CT: The photo of the historical marker and road signs near the Lewis and Clark campsite is really plain, yet I keep going back to it. Why do I like that photo?

RM: Here’s the thing, I ask myself that oftentimes. Sometimes I don’t know. There’s something ironic about it. It’s such a common scene, but it also has that photographic quality of light and tonality that for those of us who love black and white traditional photography it has these tonalities we love seeing. But it’s almost like a so-what picture. I agree. I like that picture a lot. And I’m not exactly sure why.

CI: What do you hope people take away from the exhibit?

RM: There’s no singular goal. My interest is multi-layered. It goes back to simply exploring parts of the river I’d never been to, particularly the Canadian sections of the river where there are vast stretches that are virtually inaccessible unless you’re willing to go down dirt logging roads and stuff. There’s the Native history I wish we knew more about. There’s the industrialization of the river.

CI: Fair to say this exhibit has a strong personal connection for you?

RM: Going back 25 years ago, we were living in Hood River and so I was playing on the river. I was a windsurfer. I always thought it was a great recreational thing but I never thought of it as much more than that. We think of the Columbia Gorge because it’s our backyard playground. I realized, myself, there were vast stretches of the river I didn’t know anything about.

Chuck Thompson is editor of Columbia Insight.

“The Great River of the West” was supported by grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC).