1980 | Shasta Dam, Photographer, Penstocks and Spillway Detail
This has been one of my favorite ‘maybe-good’ pictures since it was made. One of its aspects became more clear to me much later, when I projected it on a big screen for an artist’s talk. I used to think that my picture showed the futility of the man in front of me, trying to photograph the dam with a Pocket Instamatic. From a healthier perspective, more truthful in front of my audience, I noted the layered futility of my own effort to work the scene with a modest 6x9cm rollfilm camera.
As is often the case, the joke is actually on me, but the puzzle and the prize is in the broad search and the focused effort toward crystallizing an experience.
It’s always relative: the frame of the Pocket Instamatic is 13 x17mm, the frame of my camera was 56 x 84mm, and the downstream face of Shasta Dam adds up to 13 hectares, or 33 acres, which is about 28 million times the area of my ‘larger’ negative.
And the dam might have been even larger; the confluence of the Pitt, McCloud, and Sacramento Rivers forms a huge basin – engineering-wise, one of the best dam sites in North America. The dam was originally proposed at a height of 800 feet, to impound three times as much water as the one that we see a portion of here. Building this huge mass in concrete required copper piping cast in place, with chilled salty brine pumped throughout, essential to cure the material in less than 100 years. Copper shortages and labor restraints imposed by the Second World War reduced the scale, and the dam was completed in 1945 at a redesigned height of 602 feet.
*I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for generous support of my extended photographic survey of California water resource management during the years 1980 and 1981.