Rich Bergeman

Water is the defining element in the geography of Oregon’s High Desert. An odd statement, perhaps, considering there is so little of it out there. But that wasn’t always so. During the late Pleistocene, the entire expanse of the Great Basin was covered by vast inland seas. Over the last 10,000 years they ever so slowly dried up, leaving the arid terrain we’re familiar with today. 

The footprints those paleo lakes left behind--the dust-blown playas and shallow salty seas sprinkled throughout Central and Eastern Oregon--are what inspired this project. As a seasonal explorer of the High Desert, I had always wondered about all those “lakes” marked on maps that didn’t exist in fact, at least not as bodies of water, and so I began to research the natural history of this seemingly empty expanse. While history has always driven my work, I had previously focused on the human story, like the pioneer communities that sprang up or died out on the desert, depending on the availability or scarcity of water. This project is different. Now I’m looking back on a slowly unfolding story that was centuries in the making. It’s not something I was able to see at first--it’s taken years of forays into the High Desert with my camera to appreciate the spare elegance of its landscape, the wide horizons and immense skies, and the often surprising bursts of lushness where water can still be found, most often where it is managed by man to his own benefit. 

The challenge was to find a new way to share this story with an audience, and I found the solution in black-andwhite infrared photography. Stripped of the color that often obscures form in the landscape, and emboldened by the dark, brooding skies emphasized by the IR spectrum, the High Desert becomes a dramatic panorama upon which the forces of nature and time can more easily be seen and appreciated.