Lee Moorhouse - Stereographs.
Lee Moorhouse produced a substantial group of stereographic photographs as part of his wider documentation of eastern Oregon, Washington and the Columbia Plateau from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. Working with paired images designed to be viewed through a stereoscope, Moorhouse photographed landscapes, railway lines, river transport, farms, harvesting operations, towns and the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Surviving stereoscopic plates include views of camps on the Umatilla Reservation, pupils and buildings at the Umatilla Indian School, railroad tracks, agricultural crews and horse drawn harvesting equipment. His stereographs sit within an archive made principally between 1888 and 1916, when stereoscopic photography remained an established means of presenting landscapes and distant places with an impression of three dimensional depth.
The stereographs extend Moorhouse's work beyond the formal Indigenous portraits for which he became widely known and provide a broader record of the region in which he lived and worked. Agriculture and expanding transport networks appear repeatedly, including wheat ranches, harvesting machinery, railways and Columbia River shipping, alongside reservation landscapes and community life. The paired negatives also reveal how Moorhouse used foreground subjects, converging railway tracks and successive planes within landscapes to exploit the depth produced by stereoscopic viewing. The University of Oregon's Moorhouse collection preserves thousands of his glass plate negatives, including these stereoscopic views, although attribution within the larger archive requires some care because Moorhouse also acquired negatives made by other photographers.
Lee Moorhouse
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