A small archive-reading project on the public-domain photographic record of the northern Oregon coast — Astoria, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Tillamook Head, Haystack Rock — drawing on the holdings of the Clatsop County Historical Society, the Oregon Historical Society, and the Library of Congress.
Each entry takes one photograph in the public domain and reads it slowly — when it was taken, by whom, what was happening on the coast that summer, what the photograph quietly records and what it leaves out. The entries are short essays in the art-historical reading-room tradition.
The 1906 Brück & Sohn lithograph of Cannon Beach is one of the earliest mass-printed images of the Oregon coast to circulate in Europe. The image — a small lithograph, printed in Meissen for the German tourist trade — quietly records the moment at which the Oregon coast became a long-distance tourism destination.
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The aerial view of Pacific City, taken from a small Cessna in approximately 2008, shows the dory fleet on the beach at the foot of Cape Kiwanda. The dory fleet at Pacific City — the last surviving fleet of small open boats launched directly off the beach on the Oregon coast — is one of the quiet surviving artefacts of the pre-marina coast.
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The Race the Wave 5K is an annual community event in Cannon Beach in which residents and visitors run the tsunami evacuation routes from the beach to the assembly point on the high ground. The 2010s photograph in the archive captures something specific about how the coastal community holds the threat of the Cascadia subduction event in its civic life.
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The 1906 Brück & Sohn lithograph of Seaside shows the Moore Hotel — the principal early-twentieth-century resort hotel of the northern Oregon coast — against the backdrop of Tillamook Head. The Moore burned in 1923 and was rebuilt at smaller scale; the 1906 image is, in effect, the only surviving widely-circulated record of the original building.
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The Cove Beach shoreline photograph in the archive is undated and is by an unattributed photographer. It is, in my reading, one of the quietest images in the Clatsop holding — a long unbroken stretch of beach below Cape Falcon, with no people, no buildings, and the long flat light of a winter afternoon.
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Retired reference librarian, formerly of the Astoria Public Library. Works as a volunteer with the Clatsop County Historical Society. The reading-room is an unpaid side-project of that volunteer work. More on the project →