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When the Photographs Came Home
I have looked at Richard's photographs so many times that certain details have become familiar to me: a man's expression, the position of a fishing net, the color of the hills beyond the Columbia, the extraordinary white water of Celilo.
But today they became something else. Photographs again. Large, luminous, beautifully printed and framed.
Nearly seventy years after Richard stood beside the Columbia and released the shutter, his photographs were leaning against the walls of the gallery that bears our name.
And I felt almost everything at once.
The People Richard Photographed
Twenty-three photographs. A community beside the river. And the responsibility of remembering that every face belonged to a life.
There is a moment in working with an old photograph when the person in it stops being part of history and becomes simply a person.
The Art of Looking Carefully
When Richard arrived at Celilo in the fall of 1956, he was twenty-three years old. He carried two cameras and two rolls of color film.
That limitation matters. Every time Richard released the shutter, he used one of a finite number of exposures.
There was no screen on which to review what he had made. No nearly limitless supply of digital frames. No opportunity to photograph everything and decide what mattered later.
He had to choose.
Two Cameras, Two Rolls of Color Film
We live in a photographic culture of abundance.
A single afternoon can produce hundreds of images. We photograph a scene, check it, adjust, photograph it again, make variations, change positions, and keep working until we are satisfied.
Richard had no such luxury. Film imposed a discipline that digital photography has largely removed. Every exposure spent something.
What Was Celilo Falls?
Celilo Falls was located on the mid-Columbia River, about twelve miles east of The Dalles, Oregon.
It was not a single picturesque waterfall in the way we might imagine one today. Celilo was part of an approximately nine-mile stretch of rapids, falls, channels, rocks, and fishing places along the Columbia.
At the falls, the river narrowed dramatically. In places, the Columbia was forced through a passage as narrow as forty feet. Over roughly half a mile, the river dropped more than eighty feet.
The result was extraordinary.
Before the Water Rose: Celilo Falls
For millennia, the falls and the surrounding stretch of the Columbia were an important Indigenous fishery and gathering place. People traveled there to fish, trade, gather, and maintain relationships that extended across a vast region. The geography of the river created extraordinarily productive fishing sites, and generations of knowledge were embedded in how people worked within its powerful current.
In Richard's photographs, that history isn't abstract.