October 11, 2025 through November 05, 2025

Rich Bergeman • The Paleo Lakes Project

Water is the defining element in the geography of Oregon’s High Desert. An odd thing to say, 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, steppe 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 reality, at least not as bodies of water, and so I began to research the natural history of this seemingly empty expanse. History has always driven my work, but I usually focus 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. Here 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 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 fresh way to share this story, and I think I found the answer in b+w infrared photography. Stripped of the color that can distract from form, and emboldened by IR’s dark, brooding skies, the High Desert becomes a dramatic panorama where the forces of nature and time are more readily revealed.

~ Rich Bergeman

Rich’s Bio

A native of Ohio and an Oregonian since 1976, I’ve been a journalist, educator and curator during my career, and an exhibiting fine art photographer for the past 40 years. In that time I’ve explored a variety of photographic media, but whatever camera is in my hands, what I most enjoy is pointing it backward, to the past. In recent years my focus has been on telling stories about local histories of the Northwest through photographs of what’s been left behind. Most recently, I’ve been photographing remnants of the great Paleolithic lakes that once covered Oregon’s High Desert, as well as landscapes of Kalapuya tribal homelands in the Willamette Valley. Originally a large-format photographer printing in both silver and platinum, I currently work with digital cameras converted to record infrared light and print with archival pigment inkjet printers.

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