Wild Beauty ─ Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867?957

Wild Beauty illuminates the rich photographic heritage of one of the most magnificent landforms of the American West with 134 images by three dozen photographers, including Carleton Watkins, Benjamin Gifford, Fred Kiser, Lily White, Sarah Ladd, Alfred Monner, and Ray Atkeson. These rare photographs, most of them previously unpublished, have been meticulously restored and then carefully reproduced in four-color process to capture the nuanced tones and subtle coloring of albumen silver prints, gelatin silver prints, platinum prints, hand-colored photographs, and early Kodachromes.
The Columbia Gorge exerts a powerful influence on the lives and imaginations of those who live in the region, and those who visit. As the only near-sea-level passage through the Cascade Range, it was a corridor of trade and a center of culture for Native Americans for thousands of years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lewis and Clark traced their westward path of exploration through the Gorge, and half a century later the early emigrant wagon trains followed the same course to the Pacific Northwest. More