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Reviews
RIVER OF MEMORY: THE EVERLASTING COLUMBIA
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by William D. Layman
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Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, Wenatchee, Wash., in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, and University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2006.
Illustrations, photographs, maps. 165 pages. $40.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. |
| River of Memory is an exercise in nostalgia and an ode to rivers as flows of meaning as well as water. William Layman seeks to present the Columbia River as it appeared in photographs before dams and as it is remembered in poetry and prose. Based on a museum exhibit at the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, which has toured or will tour to several regional museums in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, the book reads like an exhibit in printed form. Lavishly illustrated with historical photographs, paintings of fish, and selected portions of historical cartography, the book succeeds best as a visual statement. Like an exhibit, it can also be experienced from different vantage points and read backwards or forwards. Almost all of the photographs are black and white and capture river views and several sites that no longer exist in anything like their form in the images. The book has been well-produced and the cumulative visual effect is impressive. Layman inverts the familiar river narrative that begins at the trickle of a glacier and ends in the ocean by constructing the sequence of images from delta to source, as if mimicking the spawning route of a salmon. On many of the pages, paintings of fish (mainly salmon) provide a sense of the species that existed (or still exist) in the area photographed. Alongside the graphics lie commentaries, poems commissioned for the exhibit, and short statements culled from historical journals and documents. The connections between these statements and the visual evidence are generally left for readers to infer. Apart from source and date information for the photograph, as well as the name of the photographers when known, the editor provides no direct commentary on the images. The chief editorial intervention is a statement indicating the location of the site represented in the photograph and its distance from the ocean and river source. The construction of river views in photographic form, the choice of subject and vantage point, the decision to include humans in the landscape or not, and the history of the production of the photographs and their preservation are all topics that regrettably receive no discussion. The examples of historical cartography included also provide only portions of maps, leaving keys and distance bars outside the frame. Maps operate here as much for artistic effect as for geographical information. |
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Layman's aim to restore views of the lost river produces a peculiar form of forgetting. The river of cities and settlements, of industry and exploitation, is not represented. Few people appear in the photographs, though images of indigenous fishers hold prominence. Human settlements, traces of agricultural fields, and railroad tracks can be glimpsed in a small minority of images. The attempt to represent a nonhuman landscape in photographs finds its complement in the introductory map of the river before dams were built. The landscape is painted in pleasing green hues; reservoirs are drained back into the river's banks. The map shows the landscape as it was (or might have been?) in the early 1930s, except that place names of settlements and cities do not exist and no transportation routes appear. |
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Why create an exhibit or a book about a lost landscape that privileges the natural and seeks to forget the artifactual? At a time when various river and environmental lobbies seek to undo the social and environmental effects of the big dam era, this book aims at a complementary restoration of memory and spirit. This book about memory can also be read as an act of anticipation that mobilizes aesthetics and emotions for political ends. |
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It is unfortunate that Layman's research into historical photographs and original sources on the Columbia does not engage other contemporary and contending environmental visions of the river. Blaine Harden's A River Lost (Norton, 1997), written by the son of a dam construction worker turned Washington Post journalist, offers an angst-ridden discussion of how the damming of the Columbia made and unmade communities and created a range of overlapping claims to the river. Harden's portrait focuses readers' attention squarely on the river that Layman seeks to forget and remove from view. Richard White's Organic Machine (Hill and Wang, 1995) also implicitly challenges the celebration of the natural river embedded in River of Memory by directing our attention to how constructed the natural world is and how natural is the world we construct. |
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| MATTHEW EVENDEN
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| University of British Columbia, Vancouver |
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