Harley Cowan
Harley Cowan
Portland, OR
I am a film photographer based in Portland, Oregon. I am also a practicing architect. My interest in large format film led to a research fellowship in heritage documentation and historic preservation with work in the Library of Congress. I can provide photography satisfying the Secretary of the Interior Standards and Guidelines for Architectural and Engineering Documentation for mitigation and preservation documentation.
Project Types
Commercial
Residential
Impact Areas
Locally Owned + Operated
“I travel to historically significant but largely unrecorded sites throughout the Pacific Northwest to interpret and record architectural and engineering heritage with a large format camera. For the past century, this has been the traditional tool for making architectural photography because it allows for in-camera perspective correction, its sheet film provides greater resolution than any other source, and it remains the only way to satisfy a 500-year archival standard required by the Library of Congress.
There was a time when photographers established themselves with work produced for a private or federal documentation program such as the Farm Security Administration or Works Progress Administration. Unlike other New Deal programs following the Great Depression, there are three federal documentation programs which are on-going and active today. They continue to follow strict guidelines for black & white, large format, film photography. As a contemporary photographer, I believe early practice within these programs provides a valuable foundation upon which to build.
The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) was established in 1933 as a joint venture between the National Park Service, the American Institute of Architects, and the Library of Congress as a way preserve American built history. Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) was added in 1969 to record American industry and infrastructure. The Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) was created in 2000.
I grew up in Richland, Washington next to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. B Reactor, brainchild of physicist Enrico Fermi, completed in 1944 as part of the Manhattan Project, was the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor which produced plutonium for the Trinity Test at Los Alamos, New Mexico and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Arguably the greatest engineering feat of the 20th Century, and the most terrible, a Promethean altar of science, it has long held a fascination. Photo documentation first began in 2017, when I was granted a research fellowship and four days of access to the Hanford Reservation and B Reactor.”
Featured Projects
East Grandstands at Hayward Field
I documented the historic East Grandstands at Hayward Field on the University of Oregon Campus prior to demolition.
8th Street Bridge - Pendleton
I documented the historic 8th Street Bridge in Pendleton, Oregon prior to its demolition and move to a city park.
Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford
I documented B Reactor, the world's first full scale nuclear reactor which produced the plutonium for the Trinity Test at Los Alamos, New Mexico and the Fat Man Bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan
