phsc.ca

California oak trees on the Knowles ranch, from Berryessa Valley The Last Year (Image credit: Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones Photographs and Papers)

Toronto. In 1959 the famous St. Lawrence Seaway opend. All but two of the canals and locks raising ships to the height of the upper great lakes were on Canadian soil although the seaway is a joint US-Canadian enterprise opening the mid-west to the Atlantic.

To accommodate the Seaway, some Ontario towns were flooded after the buildings and people were relocated further from the water-way. I wonder if any famous photographers recorded the events leading up to the opening?

In the 1950s, a similar project in California flooded rural land to create a lake. The event was photographed by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones as commissioned by Life Magazine, but then shelved by them in 1957.

A May 4th article by Tom May in Digital Camera World covers the release of a digitized form of the photographs.

The article begins, “There’s a particular satisfaction in seeing a photographer’s contact sheets, the frames they hesitated over, the shots they almost used, the alternatives that never made the cut. Most of us, sadly, will never get that access. For the complete archive of one of Dorothea Lange’s most ambitious projects, though, that access has just become free to anyone with an internet connection.

“UC Santa Cruz Library has digitised and published 3,200 photographs taken by Lange and Pirkle Jones for their project Death of a Valley, a documentary record of the final year of Monticello, a small agricultural community in California’s Berryessa Valley.

“By 1957, Monticello was gone, its buildings demolished and its land submerged beneath Lake Berryessa, created by damming Putah Creek to supply water to California’s booming postwar population. Lange and Jones spent 12 months, starting in February 1956, documenting the town and its people before the water rose.”

Old photo collectors may well investigate the works of Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones. In our coming events some Lange or Jones prints may surface (or those of other famous North American photographers).