-- SOMETIMES HE stands for hours in the dead of winter, waiting for the perfect light, waiting for the knifelike winds to carve sharp-edged sculptures out of the smooth, muted landscape.
This is a world that Ed Vliek has been documenting for 20 years, hauling
his tripod and large-format camera across the sand in the early morning
darkness, before the dune-buggy crowd stirs. Then he waits.
Photographer Ed Vliek has been staking out the dunes for more than 20 years. |
He likes it that way: Alone. Quiet. Just Ed and the Oregon dunes.
Each visit is different, thanks to the changing wind, rain and sunlight. Vliek sometimes arrives at a spot where the wind had created a glacierlike cornice two weeks earlier, only to find the sand brushed smooth again by the wind.
"The dunes literally change by the hour," says Vliek, whose photographic exhibit Light, Shadow and Sand will be on display beginning Friday at the Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene.
For the record
Vliek never imagined that his initial fascination with the coastal dunes would prove to be an important historical record of a disappearing landscape. The gradual encroachment of non-native European beachgrass is threatening the open sand that once stretched along 50 miles of coastline from north of Florence to Coos Bay. Its beauty and uniqueness moved Congress to declare 31,000 acres of the Oregon Coast a national recreation area.
Thousands of acres of dunes have been overrun by the beachgrass, which
coastal residents and government agencies started planting five decades
ago in an effort to stabilize the dunes. Now the U.S. Forest Service and
other land managers are trying to get rid of it.
"Bright Light" is one of Ed Vliek's most recent images
of the Oregon dunes.
"To Georgia O.K."
"Ripples"
"Dunescape" Photos: ED VLIEK
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Vliek's exhibit of 30 black-and-white photos will serve as a permanent reminder of what the open dunes looked like - if or when the vegetation wins out.
"Every picture I take is an act of preservation," says Vliek, 50, a Eugene resident who runs the Dot Dotson photo shop at Valley River Center. "I don't see a point in time where they're going to save the dunes."
The Maude Kerns show will feature an educational display about the disappearing dunes, including aerial photographs showing the march of vegetation over time near the Siuslaw River's South Jetty, just south of Florence.
The first photograph, taken by the Forest Service in the 1930s, shows almost all sand; the latest, from the early 1990s, shows grass and shrubs covering much of the same spot.
Vliek's show will tour the Oregon Coast later this year and into the next. His photographs are scheduled to be on display in November and December at the Florence Events Center, in March 2000 at the Newport Visual Arts Center and in June and July of next year at the Pacific Rim Gallery in Astoria.
Sharing his photographs with the public will "help direct the course of human relationship to this endangered landscape," he says.
That's a tall order for Vliek, who says his annual trips to the dunes have become a personal journey of self-fulfillment and satisfaction, a kind of "visual and spiritual pilgrimage."
"My photography is for me," he adds. "I do it for me, not to make money."
Drawn by the dunes
Vliek became enchanted with the dunes while touring the United States after working in Hawaii as a photographer and as a "go-fer" for a cinematographer who was documenting the eruption of Mount Kilauea.
His first stop to take photographs in Oregon was at Honeyman State Park. He walked out onto the dunes and was fascinated with the shapes and sharp contrasts created by the wind, rain and sunlight.
"The dunes were drawing me in and I didn't even know it," he says.
Vliek moved to Eugene and worked in a photo shop for years, gave that up to be a carpenter's apprentice and then returned to his previous retail work. A self-taught photographer, he perfected his black-and-white photography skills by returning to the dunes every winter, sometimes 20 times or more.
He likes the winter because he rarely runs into anyone on the dunes. But the weather also is conducive to creating fascinating formations in the sand. The summer wind tends to flatten out the sand, he says.
Sometimes he stands there for hours, waiting for sunlight that never appears. He packs up his camera, loaded with 4-inch-by-5-inch film, and his gear, and heads in to Florence, then gives it another try in the late afternoon. He's gone whole seasons without taking a decent photograph, he says.
But plenty of times it has all clicked, when the light and wind and sand presented him with stunning images of an Oregon landscape: Wispy clouds reflected in dunal lakes, sharp contrasts of light and darkness, moody landscapes reminiscent of Ansel Adams' work, even whimsical sand faces or body parts.
One image is called "Posterior."
"It's all sand, you know. It's the same stuff," he says. "So instead of naming a print `Dunes Shot No. 37,' I give each one a nickname."
Vliek's show is unusual for Maude Kerns in that, "We normally don't have solo shows here," says Carla Zimmerman, who headed the selection committee for the nonprofit art center.
However, "Ed really impressed us. His work is phenomenal. It's poignant . Nature has created a work of art for him to capture."
LIGHT, SHADOW AND SAND
WHAT: Black-and-white photos by Ed Vliek, who's been documenting the Oregon dunes for 20 years, complemented by Karen Glickman's poetry and Kyra Kelly's calligraphy; also on display are Vliek's photographs of Italy, the Southwest and the Northwest
Source: 5/23/99, Register Guard, by Lance Robertson.
