During the Great Western Migration, as the Native American population gradually gave way to disease, conflict and broken treaties, they were replaced by pioneers hoping to start a new life on their land.
— Oregon photographer Rich Bergeman from his statement for his exhibit The Vanishing West in Eugene, Oregon, May-June 2021.
Gave way. Replaced. Pioneers. New life. Their land (whose?) And: Great. Sadly, it's too easy to criticize this disturbing statement. Its transparent framing echoes the nostalgic-logic of the photographs in the exhibit as Bergeman “explores the backroads east of the Cascades in search of vanishing relics of the Northwest frontier” photographing “a “landscape dotted with melancholic relics…” A statement as dated as the “traces left of settlement efforts” which comprise the objects of his photographs.
During my own travels "east of the Cascades" I have come to see The West as an ever-present vanquishing. The Vanquishing West, my series of photographs, by sheer necessity. Yes, often melancholic, and layered, urgent, molten — a contemporaneous here-now scape for/in an implicate future, dissolving as I gaze… Yet …
… vanquishing and vanishing signal parallels; simultaneous inflections. In this sense time (past-present-future) collapses into a space of erosion, sedimentation, eruption and emergence. If something is disappearing or conquering there is ever present a profound ground of being and becoming: creation. In ways and manners human cognition can only glimpse or guess.
A photograph is true only outside the edges/boundaries of the frame: The ghost outside the machine — to reverse mirror a concept popularized by Arthur Koestler. Perhaps it is with this spirit that Bergeman concludes his exhibit statement: “…ghost towns gradually giving up their ghosts…“
CODA
Close and thoughtful viewing always rewards the memory and the heart and will make you a better conversationalist at dinner!
— Sandy Brown Jensen, review, KLCC - NPR for Oregonians, May 6, 2021
The Vanishing West exhibit continues through June 12: https://www.wlotus.com/current-exhibition/ or https://www.wlotus.com/
Meanwhile, peruse selected “conversationalist” images from The Vanquishing West, an ongoing project from this RockArtOregon author.
