Sister Turbine

About forty five minute’s drive into the Columbia River Gorge, one of the Bonneville Dam’s original, WPA-era turbines rises into the sky above a long green lawn above the river.

I began photographing the Bonneville Dam about five years ago when I happened to drive by just before sunset to discover a full moon rising above it. 

I had arrived there quite unexpectedly. Until then, I had been shooting almost exclusively in the soft natural light studio that my east-facing dining room makes very early every morning for maybe a couple of weeks on either side of each equinox. It is during that specific curve of the physical year that the sun rises firmly, softly, (and at the sort extraordinary angle you can perhaps only enjoy above the 45th parallel) around and behind a silhouetted Mount Hood and into that room.

I would wake up before dawn and abstract the sunrise over the mountain.  Then, I would often use the light inside the room to do other work until about 7:30.

I had been waiting for that exact week in October to resume what I had left off doing in late March and I had already begun to shoot. Friends and people who worked with me would come and look at what I was doing, and then I would do some more. I had no plans or goals, it was simply a protected and beautiful era of creative discovery that was already well in progress and could only be explored within a very specific window.

That is, until a pipe dramatically burst in the 1920s house, requiring a full repiping.

Suddenly, there were lots of important decisions to be made, and a slew of workers in the house very early in the morning, making it basically impossible to shoot. And that was aside from the part where there wasn’t going to be any water.

There was no question that I had to go for at least a few days and quickly.

So I decided to hunker down in the Gorge for a few nights at a place that a friend had recently mentioned in passing.  It happened to be located quite close to the Bonneville Dam.

In retrospect, my choice was kind of a joke, since this was not only a location which brought a whole new meaning to the experience of enjoying running water (sic), but there was certainly no chance that there would be any shortage of it whatsoever.

Driving back to my hotel on the second night or so, I caught the moonrise, followed it off the main highway and down the service road, and followed its arc above this singular crossroads of  power until it was too dark to stay. 

And so there I was: outside, functionally alone, and on the edge of a huge river.  In more or less exactly the same spot where the rising sun came to me as I photographed Mount Hood at sunrise and facing where I stood now from a single, protected, and very private room in my home.

 Meanwhile, along the riverbank below, many men in plastic folding garden chairs and flanked by blue coolers silently fished Chinook. 

Since then I have been back often.  

Originally, I was looking for a single shot of this turbine to add to another series. But its curves and planes began to carve out a study on spiraling, textures, mass, scale: and also of how the curves of industry can carve out and clarify the possibilities of flow in positive and negative space and not only water.

Just to be clear, I don’t think a turbine has a gender.  It’s just that the blades and body displayed decidedly feminine qualities in abstraction. In them, you can also begin to decode a geometry and lexicon of creative power--the precise engineering angles and undulations that spin water through the turbine shaft that spins energy around and through copper and magnets to generate pure electricity.

An historic image courtesy of the Bonneville Power Authority (Creative Commons license).

Because of this, and also because this os one of a group of turbines that powered so much of the Western United States so continuously for so long (see photo above), I decided to call it “sister.”     

These images are printed on metallic silver paper and, like my other silver metallic prints, comes mounted in a ready-to-hang and 1/4 “ plexiglass  that floats about a half inch from a wall.  A mounting cleat is pre-installed and this treatment is archival. 

Available as individual prints, this series also displays nicely as a grouping  of 10” x 14” or larger images to maximize the play of natural and industrial movement; of positive and negative space.

Black Meets Water

I love the way monochrome and a little desaturation reveal the movement, structure, and contours of the forces at work in these images of water meeting an equal power: in the Columbia River Gorge, the foothills of Eastern Oregon, and above a snow-covered Icelandic shore.    

These are images of the Bonneville Dam Spillway, salmon and steelhead, waterfalls, a deserted highway at the end of a powerful snowstorm, and an aerial sunrise.

I appreciate the x-ray translucence and approachability that can be found here in the enormous, dangerous, and inherently inhuman--even as these same hazardous shallows and depths provide inspiration, literal power, and a mystical reminder and imperative of the necessity to look beyond ourselves. Subjects like these sit at the intersection of resources and transcendence.   This location is somehow very specific and special to the Pacific Northwest. It speaks in the rhythm of currents and directly to being.   

 I've made my home here for almost twenty years,  but I come from the New York metropolitan area. So a subtle perpetual and enduring sense of wonder and also a little fear at being a immigrant in a land that has embraced me and my inner wildness is a crucial ingredient.

It could be argued that water--as a totem, as a resource, as an antagonist, as a partner--lies at the center of the mandala of Pacific Northwest life. I hope that this series opens a new or wider kind of pathway into your relationship with the abundant, the industrial, the ancient, and the quenching.

Even when water is still, we know its incredible, inevitable and (to the spirit) magical capacity not only to move but to change state. So when we capture that fleeting movement in a still image we are magicians, we cheat mortality, we get to keep something that cannot ever be held.
 

Water is always a story.

Welcome

What exactly are you looking at?  

Each abstract canvas you see on this site is rendered from a single in-camera image. 

Using the digital capture as a base, I use very ordinary photographic digital editing techniques and also layer, blend, and filter an image's pixels to explore and render hidden structures and patterns in what are mostly images of primal energy in motion.   I don't cut, paste, collage, or in any other way alter the base image.   In most cases, the original image is water moving through the Columbia River Gorge:  either one of the many arterial waterfalls, or the Columbia River itself. 

I regularly visit and photograph this region, which is less than an hour from my home.  I am more drawn to the constantly changing, energetic event of the water encountering wind, sunshine, rain, and the earth herself and to the changing doorways and forms this event creates  than I am in the full trajectory of story of the cascade tumbling over a cliff and descending to earth.  It was the desire to explore and render this aspect of a waterfall that drew me to explore this approach.

In general, I tend toward abstraction.  Some of my more realistic work will also give you a key as to where I come from and how I have been fed and influenced.  For instance, in The Curve  you will find a series-in-progress of juxtapositions of the American Southwest and the great civilizations of Europe,  where I have lived for about seven years total of my adult life.  

Gehry Peix and Fruiting Tree. Olimpic Port Barcelona, 2012.

Most of this work is available for purchase as editioned fine art prints in metallic or matte finishes  (usually, it depends on the print).  A few open editions will also be available.  To find out more,  please contact us directly via the sidebar to the left, and we will be honored to assist you.  We also greatly look forward to making a changing selection of prints and cards physically available in my small studio  located in the center of the Alphabet District of Northwest Portland, Oregon.

This site is currently in "studio visit' mode.   That is, it will tend to fill out and/or structurally refine,  as the site continues to develop.  

Want to keep informed?   May I suggest subscribing to my judiciously published newsletter, which is unlikely to be sent out more than once a month (you can also find the link in the column to the left).  That is, notwithstanding the rare inspiration emergency.    

Please keep scrolling for more details about the work and the visual dimension of this site and look to the left side of the page for other ways to stay in touch. 

Thank you and warmly,

Deborah Bergman