During the height of the mid-August heat-wave, Restore Oregon kept things cool by inviting Portland-based photographer and licensed architect Harley Cowan to join us for five days of photographing the historic Jantzen Beach Carousel. Restore Oregon’s Jantzen Beach Carousel Project Manager, Stephanie Brown, sat down with Harley to discuss his work on this and other projects.
SB: Thanks so much for being willing to chat, Harley. Tell us a bit about your background.
HC: I’m an architect at TVA Architects. My job is laboratory planning, but I have also been a serious photographer for the past five years. I was recently inducted as a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and last year I was awarded the Van Evera Bailey Fellowship.
SB: The Van Evera Bailey Fellowship has been offered since 2001 through a partnership between the Architecture Foundation of Oregon (AFO) and the Van Evera and Janet M. Bailey Fund of The Oregon Community Foundation (OCF). It supports mid-career design and building professionals in contributing to their professions and communities by funding research projects, sabbaticals, teaching engagements, collaborations and/or production of public education projects. What spurred you to apply for this fellowship, and what have you photographed in addition to the Jantzen Beach Carousel?
HC: Spurred… I see what you did there! I have spent the past five years learning the ropes of heritage documentation by photographing subjects including Cloud Cap Inn on Mount Hood and B Reactor at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington. Recording the Pacific Northwest’s contributions to architectural heritage is a passion of mine, so the Van Evera Bailey Fellowship seemed like the perfect fit for my skills and interests. I guess AFO and OCF thought so, too.
So far for this fellowship, I have photographed some of the interiors at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gordon House in Silverton. And Docomomo Oregon made me aware of a stunning mid-century church, the Tenth Church of Christ, Scientist in Westmoreland. I got in there just in time to create a record — it has since been demolished. I worked with ODOT to photograph the Scottsburg Bridge over the Umpqua River which is being replaced, and the Meacham Schoolhouse prior to demolition. I also photographed the Bybee-Howell House on Sauvie Island. I am currently working with Multnomah County to photograph the Multnomah County Courthouse before it changes hands, and with Walter Cole (aka Darcelle) to photograph Darcelle XV which is pursuing a National Register listing. There are a number of other places I would like to include in this body of work, including Kam Wah Chung in John Day.
SB: Wow! You’ve been really busy! What interested you in adding the Jantzen Beach Carousel to your collection of images?
HC: The purpose of my fellowship is to photographically record a cross-section of Oregon’s architectural heritage. In this context, the carousel pushes the boundary of what has traditionally been thought of as “place.” But the carousel has a greater significance to many Oregonians than a courthouse, a neighborhood church, or a private residence does.
I have been a lecturer at the University of Oregon’s Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School every year since attending as a student back in 2016. Last year, I met Restore Oregon’s Development Director, Nicole Possert. Nicole explained that you and she were planning to conduct a condition assessment inventory on the carousel’s herd and said she thought it might be the ideal time to make a historic record as well. This dovetailed seamlessly with my fellowship. I had never worked on a historic inventory project before that was so literally an inventory of components. That was an interesting challenge, one that required a very different approach from photographing a building.
SB: Did shooting photos of our herd change your feelings about the carousel?
HC: I did visit and ride the carousel while it was still in operation at Jantzen Beach, but I didn’t grow up here so I don’t have the same emotional connection to the carousel that some people do. That said, making portraits of the horses was a fascinating experience. They each have distinct personalities. I was surprised by the intricacy and craftsmanship of details, the stories being told by their accoutrements. I didn’t realize that there was a mix of horses made from two different periods with different styles of construction. I’m now more convinced than ever that the carousel needs to be a permanent part of the Portland cityscape.
SB: Can you explain your preference for film over digital photography, and tell us a bit about your camera equipment?
Shooting film is one of the requirements for the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Architectural and Engineering Documentation, the rulebook used by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). Black and white sheet film is used because of its high degree of resolution, archival stability, and the ability of a large format camera to provide in-camera perspective correction. This creates a physical artifact which can be digitized and printed well into the future. Other formats (medium format, 35mm) are acceptable for supplementary photography, as are color film and digital photography. For most HABS-type documentary work, I use a Sinar F2 view camera. This is similar to the big view cameras that Ansel Adams used, with a lens board at the front, a viewing glass at the back and bellows in between.
SB: And what interested you about HABS originally?
HC: A number of well-known photographers established themselves with work produced in a heritage documentation program like the Farm Security Administration or the Works Progress Administration. HABS was established in 1933 and, unlike other New Deal programs, remains active today. Since I am an architect, I felt like this was a place I could make a contribution as a photographer and could help stem some attrition—there simply aren’t as many qualified large format photographers around as there used to be.
SB: What do you enjoy about creating black and white images?
HC: I like black and white photography for a number of reasons. It is an abstraction of reality but an abstraction that doesn’t make us question its authenticity. In fact, the term black and white is used as a metaphor for getting down to facts. I also like being in control of the entire photographic process from visioning to capture to development and ultimately printing. Printing is perhaps the most important part because that represents the culmination of the photographer’s vision.
SB: Can you explain the approach you used when photographing the carousel?
HC: For most of the work for the Van Evera Bailey Fellowship, I am using large format film. For the carousel, because of the number of subjects and the time limitations, I made the choice to use medium format film. I shot Ilford FP4+ fine-grained panchromatic film with a Hasselblad 503CW and a complement of lenses. I photographed 82 horses, six or seven frames per horse typically, making over 500 frames for the whole project. The negatives are square frames about two-and-a-half times the size of a standard 35mm frame but a quarter the size of a 4×5 sheet of large format film. For each horse, I shot both side profiles, a ¾ profile in each direction and a couple of detail shots which would vary from horse to horse. The close-ups might be of the head and mane, the breast collar, the side flap of the saddle, or the cantle.
The Secretary of the Interior’s guidelines require that film is developed by hand because machines can leave trace amounts of chemistry that are detrimental to negatives and prints over time. I developed all my negatives myself.
SB: And they turned out beautifully! Restore Oregon is truly grateful to you for creating such a gorgeous and lasting record of the Jantzen Beach Carousel as it looked in summer of 2020.
To view more of Harley’s imagery, please visit his website at https://www.harleycowan.com or his Instagram feed at @harleycowan.
Also, many thanks to Cory Kaufman for this wonderful video which documented Harley’s process while the photographing the Jantzen Beach Carousel: https://vimeo.com/449132285
What Is HABS/HAER/HALS?
Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements between the National Park Service, the Library of Congress and the private sector, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) are among the largest and most frequently consulted collections in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. A Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) was added to these collections in 2000 document achievements in American landscape design.
Over 581,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs and written histories document significant achievements in architecture, engineering and landscape design in the United States and its territories from Pre-Columbian times through the twenty-first century. The National Park Service provides online access to the HABS/HAER/HALS collections via digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written histories and supplemental materials.
Since the HABS/HAER/HALS programs create new documentation each year, the collections continue to grow; while strict documentation standards for quality, content, format and durability ensure that these invaluable records will be available to researchers for generations to come.
Additional highlights from these wonderful collections may be viewed here: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/highlights.html#ar
Harley Cowan’s photograph of Bybee-Howell House on Sauvie Island is listed in HABS as #HABS-OR-47-3.
Photo Caption: Restore Oregon is grateful to the tireless crew from Portland’s Best Movers and the dedicated volunteers who helped out behind the scenes to make Harley Cowan’s photo documentation project possible, including Abby Bushman, Lori Idsinga, and Chloe, Ginger and Julio Brown. In a future issue of Field Notes, we will share a peek at the condition inventory our staff conducted while Harley Cowan created his striking carousel images.
