Photographing 'America's pyramid'

MOSES LAKE — It is the largest hydroelectric dam in the United States.

And according to photographer Brooks Heard, the Grand Coulee Dam, finished in 1942, is also America’s “Great Pyramid,” a truly monumental endeavor whose construction could never be replicated.

“Never could be built today. Safety standards would be one barrier, as would environmental ones,” he said.

Heard was standing amid “Water at Work,” a collection of photographs on exhibit Friday evening at the Moses Lake Museum Gallery of irrigation canals, orchards, dams, and pipes across the Columbia Basin.

His color photographs were scattered among giant black and white photos from another era, old photos of men (and a few women) from another era, welding steel, pouring concrete, digging earth, and evaluating construction plans under the hot Central Washington sun, building the Grand Coulee Dam, and making possible the electricity that would smelt the aluminum and process the plutonium needed to fight and win World War II and deter the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The same power that makes the data centers of Quincy and the carbon fiber plants of Moses Lake possible today.

The work of five photographers employed by the Bureau of Reclamation from the 1930s through the 1950s is on display, along with Heard’s own photos, work he spent several days combing through the Grant County Historical Archives in Ephrata to collect.

“The professional photographers employed by the Bureau of Reclamation were an extraordinary group of photographers,” he said. “These guys worked hard, they packed around four-by-fives and set them up on tripods. Virtually every one of these pictures would have been done with 35-50 pound camera and 20 pounds of tripod and carrying that around construction sites.”

“I’m just a guy who takes snapshots and take advantage of the lowered cost of high-quality images, of digital photography, the ease of printing and all that,” he said.

Four-by-five describes the size of the film or photographic plate exposed — four inches by five inches, as opposed to a typical film height of 35 millimeters — allowing for exceptionally clear images that can be blown up to a fairly large size.

The cameras themselves are bulky and heavy, with the front lens attached to the back plate by a tapering accordion.

The photos on display — everything from workers installing giant sections of pipe to uniformed Army Air Force officers listening attentively to an engineer or manager’s instructions as water roars through sluice gates behind them — cover 26 years of construction and maintenance on the Grand Coulee Dam.

Heard’s exhibit includes only a small sample of what he estimates are maybe 15,000 photos in the Grant County archive.

“This represents selections. Nobody knows how many pictures are in those archives, eight full file cabinets, and they are packed,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.