OregonScape
2011; Oregon Historical Society; Volume: 112; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ohq.2011.0074
ISSN2329-3780
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
Resumooregonscape Early motion picture photographers had to have sound nerves as well as an eye for the interesting and newsworthy.Their heavy wooden cameras had only one lens,so getting a close photograph involved moving the camera near the subject. Sometimes this led to problems. Jesse Sill was one of the premier cameramen in the Pacific Northwest. He taught himself photography around 1912 and was soon free lancing for filmmakers around the area. As part of the 1913 Walla Walla rodeo entertainment, a bear ran down the track until it was roped by one of the cowboys. After several unsuccessful efforts, he finally was getting the shot when, as he told the Oregonian years later, “he realized that the bear was right on top of him. So he turned and ran with the bear right on his heels. Later, Jesse found that the horseman had roped the bear, but held him just inches from Sill as the animal chased the cameraman down the track” (July 15, 1972). Sill had several close calls while filming.At the Pendleton Round-Up, he was filming close-ups of the stagecoach race when one of the competitors lost control of his team. The horses ran over Sill, who was unconscious for more than a day; his obituary even ran in the newspaper. In 1927, he was reported as having been drowned when an explosion washed several cameramen off an island in the middle of the Columbia River during road construction. Sill had decided he did not like the setup and left earlier in the day. And in 1956, at Multnomah Stadium, he was knocked out by an errant ball thrown by a pitcher warming up. Jesse Sill filmed every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower as they passed through the Pacific Northwest, and in 1923, he took the first aerial motion pictures of Mount Hood. Jesse Sill died in 1981, just forty-nine days short of his one-hundredth birthday. The OHS Research Library has a wealth of Sill material in its collections, such as motion pictures including many episodes of the Webfoot Weekly newsreel Sill filmed in the 1920s, oral history recordings, still photographs, personal papers, and newspaper articles. — Mikki Tint, former special collections librarian, OHS Research Library OHS digital no. bb008092 ...
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