[Alt-photo] Re: Katharine Thayer Exhibit in Astoria, Oregon

Thu May 23 04:14:46 UTC 2013

Hi Clarence,

Thanks so much for posting, and I appreciate your comments.  I'm so glad
you asked the question, too.  I'll pass along your post to Katharine's
daughter, Heather, who might want to offer more information than what I can
possibly tell you.

As I mentioned in another post, Heather showed a wonderful edited slide
show of still images, from the time Katharine was very little up through an
image of her in the last year or so of her life.  She, her parents, and (7,
if I counted right) siblings grew up in Tillamook, Oregon.  From looking at
the slides-- when they were all little-- you couldn't even tell them
apart-- all tall blue-eyed blonds.  I kept asking that night what the
order, in age, of the siblings was, and every time I asked, they all talked
at once, so I still don't have a clue-- but I do know Katharine was not the
oldest.  The family is very close.  One of the sisters (the oldest, I
think) came in from South Dakota for the event.  I thanked her for coming,
and she made the comment, "Well, of course.  When it's important, we're
always there-- we always show up. And this was important."  They're really
a great family-- and just very outgoing-- great collective sense of humor--
and very interested in hearing about Katharine's work and her involvement
in this List.  Her family told me that the name Thayer was actually their
(her) mother's maiden name, which she took as her own. Their family
(father's) name was George.

I had never really seen photos of Katharine, so it was fun to see all those
images.  She looked tall and gangly and athletic when she was younger and
seemed to be quite the outdoorsy type.  Her family made a joke about how
she stayed barefoot all the time-- and, certainly, so many of the photos
showed her enjoying the outdoors, typically barefoot, camera in hand.  I
love seeing photographs of people when they were young(er) as I think they
tell you so much about what a person is truly like.  You can see, through
images, how someone might have aged into the person he or she has become.

So Katharine has a grown son and daughter (Heather and Doug), and they were
raised in Oregon.  I really liked them a lot. It seems she moved around
Oregon quite a bit.  She was formally trained as a statistician and I
believe worked for a while in educational testing.  The last place she
lived was in Rainier, Oregon, about 50 miles east of Astoria, in a house
high on a hill overlooking the Willamette River.  Lots of little stone
walls around the property, and glass windows in the back, looking out on
the River.  She had been working really hard on her landscaping, and it was
a lovely home.  They gave me her address, so we went by there on our way
back to the airport. I was interested in seeing it, because she would tell
me about all this work she was doing there, and when I saw it, it was just
as I had envisioned from her descriptions.  She had also photographed these
string of paper mills from across the River for the longest time, which are
almost other-worldly in their appearance (in a 'Blade-Runner' sort of way),
and she captured that really well in these images she'd emailed me.  Her
family had some amusing stories about all the places she'd lived in
Oregon-- all these places ultimately had something terribly wrong with
them, hence all the moving around-- but they added--- for all that, she
sure knew how to pick great locations. (That's a photographer for you.)

I don't know Katharine's exact age when she died, but I think she was in
her early- to mid-70's.  She did have a serious heart condition and was a
frequent visitor to cardiologists. I asked how she died, because I had just
talked to her, via email, the day before, and she seemed fine. They told me
they didn't really know-- but that she had been sick with the flu, and she
did have this heart problem, so . . .   Her death was unexpected for
everyone.

Interestingly, one of her brothers asked me if we ever talked on the phone.
 We hadn't, and he asked if we ever even mentioned to each other that we
should talk on the phone-- and, honestly, I don't think that ever occurred
to either of us.  It seemed like the perfect friendship-- all email.  We
really did email almost every day- about everything, really.  And I
sometimes think people (or maybe it's just me) edit their words so much
before it hits this List, that someone's real personality perhaps never
shines through.  But while Katharine was ever the educator and
perfectionist-- she was also just so funny (very dry sense of humor).
 After being with her family for a while, I saw  that they're all like
that-- just very with it and very amusing.  And I often think, with
Katharine, that never translated on here as much as it did in our email
exchanges.  But I think she was in communication with a lot of people, on
this List and elsewhere, via email.  I can't tell you how many people wrote
to tell me that they would have never been gum printers had it not been for
her help.

As far as her own interest in gum printing, like most of us, she had an
initial interest in photographing and photography.  A look at some of those
images in the slide show suggested that she always had a camera in her
hand.  She actually mentions on her website that she only ever made one
print of anything.  Heather told me when they sorted through all her
images, they had to find ones that she'd actually signed-- because they
knew that this meant it was a finished print.  That's a good rule to have,
I guess. When I hear stories like that, I immediately think I need to
seriously clean up things around here.  Anyway-- I used a quote in the
exhibit write-up that I had pulled from her website, which was this:  "I
had a mental picture of the kind of photograph I wanted to make. I had
never seen any photographs like them, but I was determined to find a way to
make them, these pictures I saw in my head. Their colors were soft and
relatively unsaturated, but with a kind of glow about them. I had never
seen autochromes, but years later when I saw some reproductions of
autochromes, I realized that the look of autochromes is probably closer to
what I was imagining than anything that was ever done in gum historically .
. . I set out first to teach myself to print in gum, then to adapt the
method to produce the kinds of pictures I wanted to make, and have been
making them ever since."

That's just an excerpt, but you can read more about what she says about
that on her website (katharinethayer.com).

So she really didn't print in any other alt process, other than gum, and
she was self-taught.  I don't think she did very many tricolor gums, but
the ones she did were also soft and beautiful, and -- in their own way--
much like the more minimalist one-coat gums she did.  One look at the
Oregon coast, and it was that environment that seemed to have inspired so
much of her work.

So this is already again too long, but I hope that fills in a few gaps for
you.  Oh-- and as "possibly the only gum printer in Fort Smith," you must
be keeping very busy. :)

Diana

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 9:19 PM, Clarence Rhymer <crhymer at northwestel.net>wrote:

> Hi Diana,
>
> Thank you so much for doing this.  I am a long-time member of the list and
> a gum printer, but I have never contributed much.  However, I know some of
> the people here, mostly through other things alt, and not-so-alt-photo.  I
> am thrilled to see the diversity of subject and gum technique that is shown
> in the Exhibit.  I followed the discussions here, both heated and warm,
> over the years (it seems to be more subdued now), but have learned much
> from Katharine, Judy, Christina, yourself and many others.  While people
> were active on the list, I thought I knew them by their style, turn of
> phrase, etc.  Once they were gone, or at least otherwise occupied (like
> Judy) I have come to realize that I knew very little about their lives
> outside of the list.  I was shocked when I heard that Katharine had passed
> on.  It never occurred to me that she was anything but in the prime of life.
>
> So, I was hoping that the Exhibit would include a bio of Katharine. You
> have given us some info about her family, but I am curious about who she
> was, how she lived her life, and what inspired her art. Please forgive me
> if this have been included in the Exhibit info, or elsewhere, but I looked
> through it all, and could not find it.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Clarence Rhymer
> (possibly the only gum printer) in Fort Smith, NT, Canada
>
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