Enjoy The Way West, A Series by Michael Hanson
in the Main Gallery

(Showing August 4th – 27th)
Opening Night, First Friday August 4th
5-8pm

Michael Hanson is an award-winning Pacific Northwest-based photographer and filmmaker. Michael’s photography career began while playing professional baseball in the Atlanta Braves Organization. His in-depth storytelling work has taken him around the world for clients such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Outside Magazine, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Apple, Esquire and Starbucks. He has taught workshops in South America and on the Columbia River as a Nat Geo Expert on National Geographic Expeditions. Michael’s series, Portraits of the Omo, from Ethiopia remains in the Sir Elton John Permanent Collection.

Artist Statement:

For most of my adult life, I have found comfort in packing bags and traveling throughout the U.S. for photography assignments. Sometimes I go places simply out of curiosity. The motion becomes comfortable and the interactions with strangers keep me seeking more assignments. But my work life shut down in the spring of 2020. I was home and the calendar was relatively empty. Perhaps, I thought, this was a good time to experiment with a different type of photography.

I grew up in the South and attended a small University in Lexington, Virginia, where I volunteered at an education center that had been Sally Mann’s childhood home. Mann is a fine- art photographer known for her sometimes-haunting black-and-white images taken with old antique view cameras. She is, by many critics, one of the most prestigious and accomplished photographers of her generation. I have always admired her work and her approach to fine-art storytelling.

In her book, Deep South, Mann references a British historian who pondered the visceral link between the American South and Europe. He proposed that the two lands share a familiarity in their “lingering aftertaste of defeat.” There’s little doubt the American South has a complex, mournful existence.

Now I live in the Pacific Northwest. Dropping into the Gorge from the Columbia Plateau, the still waters of the Columbia River appear as a lake, drifting reluctantly toward an inevitable fate of salinity. As told in Timothy Egan’s book, The Dark Nights of the Shadow Catcher, photographer Edward Curtis traversed the West near the turn of the 19th century documenting disappearing cultures and a changing landscape. He likely stood in the same places where I set up my old wooden 4×5 camera, witnessing an inescapable progress. Photographers have documented the beauty of this region for more than a century. Like much of the West, it deserves the praise, but I’ve always wondered what this place looked like before we altered the course of the river. I couldn’t help but see a river sunk beneath a lake.

The wet plate process was the main form of photography through the 1800s and early 1900s. It begins by adding a layer of collodion to a plate of glass and then submersing that coated glass into a silver nitrate mix, causing the plate to become light sensitive. While under a red light, the glass plate is put into a film holder. I use an old 4×5 field camera to expose the plate. Returning to my makeshift darkroom in the back of my truck, I develop the plate and ‘fix’ it, allowing the plate to be removed from the darkroom. It’s a messy process. My clothes and skin are stained brown. The chemicals often do not do what I want. I pour too much. The wind blows too hard. Unwanted streaks cover the image. I don’t know why things happen the way they do but the results feel magical.

As Covid life set in, I began to explore my own method of documenting my home. How can a river be so complex? The same waters that carry remnants of our flushed and buried mistakes also provide refuge for a species that despite many hurdles, or dams, continue to fight to return home. A series of falls where salmon surrendered to a waiting net now rests at the bottom of a dark pool. A world of past and present collisions in a complicated scene where perhaps the British historian was only half right. The South is not the only American landscape that has suffered the weight of defeat.

The mysterious, unpredictable images that appear on a plate of glass under the red light of my headlamp feel appropriate, messy and complicated.