Elwha Power

October 17 - November 28, 2010

In anticipation of the upcoming demolition of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center is opening a new exhibition by photographer Harry von Stark commemorating these doomed structures. Opening with a public reception for the artist on Sunday, October 17 from 2-4 pm, the exhibition is titled Elwha Power.

A resident of Quilcene, von Stark has devoted himself to photography full force as both practitioner and also promoter of other artists’ work. In regards to the latter he has for the last three years assembled monthly shows of Peninsula photographers at his Long Gallery at the Landing Mall in downtown Port Angeles. As a photographer, he has balanced commercial assignments from local businesses with the personal fine arts imagery that brings him the most fulfillment.

The impending dismantling of the Elwha Dams fortuitously provides him opportunities in both areas. Selected as one of the project’s official documentarians for the historical record, Von Stark quickly realized that he was witness to a soon-to-vanish marvel of industrial age technology. His access to the concrete bunkers from which the dam’s operations were controlled, opened a vein of rich and powerfully graphic subjects that have been realized in the array of thirty images that comprise this exhibition.

Equal to his passion for photography, Von Stark has an equal interest in history, inflamed no doubt by his early uprooting and reinvention in the New World. Born in the newly formed Federal Republic of West Germany in 1946, Harry spent his early years in the thousand-year-old city of Ülm.

At age five, however, his family abandoned the past in that heavily bombed burg and made for the American frontier, landing in Lodi, California at the heart of the agrarian San Joaquin Valley. There the clean lines and expansive sheet metal geometry of the agribiz infrastructure imprinted his later predilections for controlled industrial landscapes.

Von Stark’s early exposure to art and design was in the DeYoung Museum, a recurring destination on family outings to San Francisco, to which he always looked forward. The hyper realistic still-lifes of the American illusionist painter, William Harnett, made an indelible impression with their exactitude and clean lines. The Dutch Masters painters, with their unadorned naturalism showed him a window on the past that awakened his yen for images steeped in historicity. He wears their influence on his face to this day with a dashing beard reminiscent of characters in van Dyke and Rembrandt.

With the tragic death of his son in 1988 von Stark slipped into a dark mood, a deep mid-life crisis that took a heavy emotional and economic toll. Looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, he traveled to the sun-blasted sands of Egypt. There in the temple ruins of Karnak and Luxor he fell under the spell of antiquity observed through the viewfinder of his camera.

The photographs of wall paintings and ancient friezes that he made there further solidified his impression of art as a bridge across the ages and the camera as a veritable time machine. Photographed in dim passageways and in various states of disrepair these images cultivated an archaeological yearning in von Stark’s artistic persona. Over the years, as his skills matured and technology expanded (i.e. the advent of Photoshop), he returned to them again and again clarifying and nuancing obscure elements as if he were an art restorer working on the objects themselves.

The Elwha and Glines powerhouses are filled with massive machines, manifested on a grand scale in a bold geometry of gears and shafts that keep in check the immense pressure of the sequestered river.

There is a sense of heightened reality in von Stark’s images. Danger — contents under pressure — is the subtext here. It is a Tom Swiftian stage set of discs and tubes that have an anthropomorphic feel, as if we’re exploring the circulatory system of a great robotic body. These big analog dials, radiating spokes and honker nuts and bolts are a far cry from the current high tech nano-environment of computer chips and LED lights. The dull sheen of oiled steel glistens against the creamy layers of encrusted paint.

From his earliest flirtations with photography von Stark has wanted to get away from frames, mats and glass — the conventions of exhibition photography. With the advent of a new digital printing process in which the dyes bearing the photographic image are infused directly into aluminum panels, he found a solution that was perfect for the hardscape of the dam environment.

A great deal of the real estate in these images of a machine world depicts metal surfaces. With highly resolved imagery of metal imbedded in real metal, the level of illusionism surpasses even Will Harnett’s hallucinatory finish, threatening to burst into the realm of the real, which had thus far been reserved for sculpture.

And if the real falls somewhat short of the ideal, there is always Photoshop. Von Stark has no issues with massaging his compositions with the localized image controls provided by digital tools, juicing his monochromes with washes of selective color, in some places subtle and in some places bold. Recalling the hand-tinting widely practiced before the general availability of direct color films, the color here brings into this cold environment an element of emotion, even if that emotion is largely nostalgia.

These images of Elwha Power seem futuristic in their celebration of an era of monumental achievement in harnessing nature. At the same time they are monuments of a future that has come and gone.