Lake Images and Prints
At any given moment, the evolving landscape is a record--a visual memory bank-- of what geological, meteorological, and biological agents have been up to in recent eons. Some memory banks evolve more rapidly than others. Although they are actually transitory, mountain ranges, for example, seem eternal compared to lakes which in most cases were created only yesterday and will disappear tomorrow morning before breakfast at the very latest.
Of all the world's lakes, two in Oregon--Crater Lake and Wallowa Lake--are among the foremost examples of the kind of landscape whose very appearance compellingly suggests an unusually recent and dramatic origin. These are landscapes that virtually tell a story at a glance, landscapes that you can't look at without wondering how they got that way. Crater Lake's story is that of a violent volcano, Wallowa Lake's of advancing and retreating glaciers. Most of the lakes in this collection of photos are in fact glacial in origin--not surprising if in fact we humans are living during an interglacial period and should ourselves be classified as transitory debris left over from the last glacial period. It is hard to look at any of these lakes without a sense that if we had been born only a few weeks earlier we might have seen them being made.
So ephemeral are lakes that photographers are sometimes seized by an urgent, nagging need to photograph them immediately before they disappear forever. Certainly this is true for mountain lakes such as Glacier and Mirror Lakes in the Wallowas, Lost and Trillium Lakes in the Cascades, and for any of the evanescent holdovers from the last Ice Age in the parched Great Basin such as Wildhorse Lake or Malheur or Summer Lakes or Lake Abert.
Having lived at the foot of Wallowa Lake for over thirty years and because I have exposed a fortune in professional format film of these subjects , I believe I have the most extensive collection of photos of Wallowa Lake that exists.
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