Artists Probe the Beauty, Geometry of Crater Lake

Every year, a half-million people drive up to the rim overlooking Crater Lake, and most of them snap a couple of photos of the startlingly blue waters before turning around and heading on their way.

Working with a Leica camera, a single 35mm lens, and black and white film, photographer Pete Myers has been skiing around the rim of the collapsed volcano as winter begins to embrace it, roping up to a tree and leaning over the edge of the caldera that forms the nation’s deepest and clearest lake.

As one of a series of artists in residence at Crater Lake National Park, Myers is trying to capture the size and geometry of this place with an image worthy of the centennial of Oregon’s only national park.

“How do you come to a place like this and not create a photographic cliche?” Myers said. “For me, it’s the geometry of the caldera and the story of the snow.

“I wanted to catch the park at the onset of winter, just when the first snowfalls were coming in,” creating a powdered-sugar effect, he said. “When the rocks are still showing through in the caldera, and the powdered sugar is highlighting the geometry of it, that’s the magic moment.”

Myers’ work and the work of two dozen other artists, each spending a couple weeks living and working at the park through the end of 2001, will be displayed at Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Museum of Art as part of the celebration marking the May 22, 2002, park centennial.

The idea came from Glen Kaye, a retired National Park Service naturalist who began his career at Crater Lake. He started similar programs at Rocky Mountain National Park and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

“One of my frustrations at Hawaii Volcanoes was seeing busload after busload of people coming by making rolling stops through the parking lots and overlooks and taking pictures of experiences they never had,” Kaye said. “We want people to have deeper and richer experiences, both intellectually and emotionally.

“It is basically continuing a tradition of looking for ways to communicate the values of the park, which are not all intellectual,” Kaye said. “Some of them are emotional, so we are trying to reach the right side of the brain.

“We are not just looking for the traditional realist, the representational artist,” Kaye said. “We are more interested in people who have original things to say.”

There are traditional artists working in oils, watercolors and pastels, but there are also a digital artist, a sculptor, a textile artist and Catie Levitt of Ashland, whose paintings are infused with the legends of King Arthur.

“One of the myths around the creation of Crater Lake was that the god of the sky and the god of the earth were having a battle that caused Mt. Mazama to blow up,” Levitt said. “That and the Arthurian legends were kind of a takeoff place for me to interpret the landscape.”

She is working on one painting titled “Forgiveness,” which depicts male and female wizards. The landscape includes an imaginary ice castle and the Phantom Ship, the very real tip of a volcanic dike that pokes out of the water of Crater Lake.

“To me, [Crater Lake] always has been a very enchanted place,” Levitt said.

Margaret Garrington, a pastel artist from Ashland, Ore., found herself getting to know the hidden wonders of the park that she had never seen when she brought out-of-town visitors up to the rim to look over the edge.

“The hardest thing about being up there was that there were so many worthy subjects for painting,” she said. “No matter where you look, you say to yourself, ‘That would be a great painting. Oh! That would be a great painting! Oh! That would be a great painting!”

Myers’ work mixes the traditional 35mm camera with digital technology.

At 16, he was a consultant to NASA, working on the backup imaging system for the Pioneer II space probe and a temperature control for a frog embryo experiment on the space shuttle. He left NASA to develop a three-dimensional audio system, which did not make him rich.

Now living in Moss Beach, Calif., he turned eight years ago to photography, using entrepreneurship as a vision. He haunted the abandoned mining towns and desert geography of the arid country east of the Sierra Nevada, looking for beauty and lessons in the broken dreams from another century.

“What you see in the West’s entrepreneurial cycle of gold mining is very much how it operates in Silicon Valley today,” Myers said. “You had two guys with a shovel and a dream. They poured in all their money and all of their hope and all of their dream.

“The people who started the wave were not the ones to benefit. It’s the organized companies that came later that reaped the harvest of the West.”

As the remnants of a volcano high in the Cascade Range, Crater Lake offers a completely different vision and challenge. To prepare himself, Myers bought plenty of Gore-Tex outdoor gear, read everything he could find about Crater Lake, studied the work of photographers who preceded him, and Web-surfed four or five times a day to Crater Cam, an Internet video image of the lake.

Crater Cam prepared him for when the light would be good for his photographs, but not for the incredible size of his subject.

Formed about 7,700 years ago after the Mt. Mazama volcano collapsed in a massive eruption, the caldera filled with melting snow over centuries to form a lake six miles wide and nearly 2,000 feet deep, containing 4.6 trillion gallons of water. From Hillman Peak, the highest point on the rim at elevation 8,151 feet, the caldera wall drops nearly 2,000 feet to the surface of the lake.

“It’s so vast and so big, there is no scale that you can hold open in your mind that you can put something that size in,” Myers said. “You cannot find a way of looking at the lake that gives it this big scale without digging into it somehow.

“The thing I found that worked best was when I was over the edge shooting down the caldera. There is this physical geometry curling around the lens and all of a sudden you start to understand how big it is.”

With the Rim Road covered with snow, he skied through unbroken snow to his photo spots. The farthest trek was eight miles to Sun Notch, where he had just 45 minutes to work before he had to start back.

“When you’re standing here it’s so geometrical--it’s just whump,” he said, looking over the edge. “But when you take a picture it flattens out.”

To create depth and clarity, the old masters of photography relied on large-format cameras and the chemical alchemy of the darkroom. To conserve weight, Myers uses a 35mm camera and just one lens. For his final image, he scans his negatives into a Macintosh computer and minutely manipulates the shading and outlines for as much as 100 hours using the program Photoshop. He then prints on a large-format laser printer.

Unlike so many tourists who looked over the edge at Crater Lake and moved on, Myers found himself wanting to come back for more.

“Now, leaving, it just seems like Chapter One,” he said of his work here. “I don’t know what Chapter Two is going to be, but it feels a lot more like Chapter One than I ever would have guessed.”

*

https:// Crater Lake National Park: https://www.nps.gov/crla/

Crater Cam:https://www.crater-lake.com/picture.htm

Pete Myers:https://www.petemyers.com

Margaret Garrington: https://www.studiofox.com