Roger Dorband’s Eco Creativeness • Oregon ArtsWatch

Roger Dorband, comrade and fierce chief within the wrestle to avoid wasting the forests of the Pacific Northwest, joined the Ancestors on October 5, 2025, passing in his sleep at age 81. A photographer, author, sculptor, and activist, he aimed his phrases and lens at ecosystems — rivers, forests, mountains, neighborhoods, streets.

“Location, location, location,” mentioned fellow photographer and longtime good friend Robert DiFranco, one of many co-founders of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. They met in 1978.

”He was bitten by the images bug and bitten arduous. I offered Roger his first digital camera and he took that 35mm and was on his approach. Paris, Thurman Street, the High Desert, the Rogue River valley or his beloved Astoria and North Coast, digital camera in hand, ardour in his coronary heart, eye on the prize, the person was there, and on a mission. He was just like the Old Post Office – by means of rain, snow, ice or hail, HE DELIVERED. And at all times the total bundle! I’ll miss him.”

A present of his images opened at RiverSea Gallery in Astoria on Saturday, January 10, and continues there by means of February 10. Curator Jody Miller, additionally a pricey good friend of Roger’s, spoke of his vary and visible poetry: “Roger made masterpieces of color and light, painterly work that inspired my own work as a photographer.”

Carol Raphael, in her review for Hipfish Monthly of his 2023 present at RiverSea, describes his images in and round Astoria as “infused with the luminous soft light of the northern coastal region and impeccably composed. … There is a quality of stillness, serenity, and even transcendence.”

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His work is in prestigious collections — the Portland Art Museum, Salem’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon in Eugene. I noticed his black and white road photographs at McMenamin’s Bottle Shop on NW twenty third Avenue and Thurman Street in Portland, from Blue Moon Over Thurman Street, his first e book collaboration with Ursula Ok. Le Guin in 2003. They have been good buddies, and got here collectively once more to make Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country.

***

Excerpt from Shutter Speed, by Astoria poet Mary Lou McAuley

In 2010 Roger Dorband and Ursula Le Guin
delivered to our senses
a e book stuffed with an enormous stillness and roaring mild
they’d gone free-ranging within the elusive Steens Mountain Country
Her poems and sketches hitching to his images
his images not needing to harness or tame her phrases and features …
So how did they do it
these two quiet watchful wanderers
I imagine it potential they merely defied
a reigning quantum reality
displaying that by our remark
panorama isn’t modified
we’re

***

The Rogue: Portrait of a River, revealed in 2006, is Roger’s masterpiece, DiFranco says, “the photographer in conversation with the living river and all life around it … secret origins, wild beauty,” the connective tissue, human interface, everlasting movement of artwork and life.

Roger was raised in Grants Pass, an Oregon logging group, grew up with the river’s energy and thriller, and was witness to the destruction from logging, chemical substances, and overfishing.

“He was an artist looking at the world. That’s how he found his way to activism,” the curator Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson mentioned after I requested her about Roger’s artwork and activism. “He was seeing the holes, the tears, and he had to deal with it.”

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Dorband and Laing-Malcolmson met within the late Seventies after they have been artists-in-residence in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County. Roger taught sculpture and Bonnie taught portray to schoolkids. They rode horses, performed chess, shared meals with Oregon poet Kim Stafford, a resident author. “Roger was a real Western guy,” she mentioned, naturally drawn to landscapes and motion.

Back in Portland, Bonnie and Robert DiFranco, then a pair, and Roger hooked as much as paint homes in the summertime so they may journey within the winter.

Robert: “He could reach the high parts with ease. However, he was a terrible under-bidder, so we directed him toward his strengths and away from the business. Thus, our friendship was launched!”

Bonnie: “I trusted him. He held me by the ankles and dangled me from a second story window so I could paint the eaves, all 6’4” of him. We talked extra about chess and portray and politics than we did about artwork. He was a proficient photographer. Land, water, spirit, soul. He lived a full life, honored and served it nicely.”

Roger met his future spouse, Patricia Barnes, whereas he was touring round India at a Sufi retreat. “We would sit together on the bus trips,” Patricia mentioned. “He showed me his photographs of India, and I thought wow, he’s an artist.”

Patricia had a psychiatry apply in Seattle, and so they wrote to one another. “He invited me to come down and meet him in the backyard. I got all dolled up, went to the backyard of the house in Portland. There was an elk upside down, blood coming from its mouth. I don’t think Roger killed it, but it was there and he was skinning it. So, we spent the afternoon skinning this poor elk so he could use the hide to make drums.”

Drumming into being the great drugs of collaboration, The Men’s Group!

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Dan Rush, one of many males within the group: “In 1988 Roger was central in pulling together a men’s group that continues to this day. He had been exposed to the work of the writer and storyteller, Michael Meade, and poet, Robert Bly, and the fledgling Men’s Movement of the 1980s. He had also done some personal healing work with Native American healers. Never did Roger claim leadership or authority within the group, which found its equilibrium in mutual love and brotherhood.”

Tom Schwartz, a member of the group, had studied Soul Stories with me and crafted a robust efficiency piece, Brother Black. Roger’s {photograph} from this story is hauntingly highly effective.

“I had to take it down,” I admitted to Tom. He did too, he confessed again. I requested Tom concerning the Men’s Group.

Tom: “Whatever that meant then, now we are a bunch of guys who like to get together a few times a year. We sit in a circle. We take turns and share the news of our lives. Over the decades, our words have created a long-form narrative. Put together, they have revealed the terrain, the mountains and the swamps, of our journeys through time. It has been a great gift to know and be known by other men in this often-lonely world. Our men’s group will meet again. But we won’t hear the sound of Roger’s voice, gravelly and rooted deep in his chest. He still has a place in our circle. Maybe some of his photographs will serve to hold it for us.”

Long-time good friend and artwork colleague Esther Podemski echoes the significance of Roger’s presence by means of the photographs he “captured with his quick and formal eye”; how supportive he was all through her life and profession, “a celebrant of all his friends’ efforts … I treasure his photographs which are on display throughout our house and will never leave their position on our walls. How will I replace my friend Roger? He was the most generous person, thoughtful and gifted and important to so many people.” 

In 2008 Roger and Patricia moved to Astoria, the place his artwork and activism started to merge in direct relationship to the forests of Clatsop County. Writer and ecologist Robert Michael Pyle was deeply influential. Pyle had revealed Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, a traditional in Northwest nature writing and literature, about logging and pure/human survival within the Willapa Hills throughout the Columbia River in Washington state.

Roger started his eco-study of the territory and the problems. Patricia mentioned he disappeared into his workplace: “I was amazed at how much time he put into research.”

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A coronary heart assault in 2015 put Roger into severe rehab, and “he got stronger,” Patricia mentioned. “He had so much determination, more energy and optimism, wanted to share his gifts, show people through his art.”

He started to compose essays from the dense collage of points hidden from the general public and concepts rising from activist channels and modern analysis. But he wanted a platform.

Ta da, enter Dinah Urell, managing editor and proprietor of Hipfish Monthly, the beloved North Coast indie newspaper. Her beautiful tribute to Roger describes what occurred subsequent: “I had been waiting and searching for a writer to address forest issues and clearcutting.”

She had learn a letter to the editor within the Daily Astorian by Roger, and knew he was “an amazing photographer.”

They met on an Art Walk. She had a narrative; would he cowl it? Yes.

“And so, we began. Roger would contribute 30 articles between August 2016 and August 2025 — condense massive amount of history, science, nature, the politics of timber, that would take any lay person years of going to the library.”

Roger and Patricia lived near KALA, the Hipfish workplace and cabaret efficiency house, and he would “stroll down to discuss the next issue he was working on. These were vibrant, candid conversations, finding humor and light, but mostly it was invaluable mentorship.”

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Bob Pyle, a daily at Ric’s Open Mic, the place I met him, has revealed essays, poetry, fiction, nature guides that vary from butterflies to Bigfoot, spanning many years and continents. He wrote: “I do not know of a more significant chronicle of local forests, their creatures, people, uses and misuses, and possible better futures, than Roger’s. It is all the more trenchant for having been compiled through an artist’s eye.”

He was squished into the again of a automotive, the tallest particular person I’d met since I moved to Astoria. Mutual buddies launched me to Roger, and I’m enthusiastic about his forest articles that began showing in Hipfish Monthly. Shocked. Quizzing him. Lots of questions.

He’s excited to speak about it, that I need to discuss it. Is this actually occurring? Why don’t folks know this? People, like me, from Portland, glossing over the main points, seeing the shaved scalps of mountains, forests with horrible haircuts, like a jail system, creeping into the landscapes round right here at accelerated charges. What’s happening? Why is that this allowed to go on? The Department of Forestry handles issues, don’t they?

Roger’s articles lower by means of the fuzzy slow-motion crime scene, piece by piece, detailing how the timber business was holding communities economically hostage, not paying taxes on their “harvests,” how they foyer their approach to energy by means of darkish cash, propaganda, tutorial affect, how toxins are being sprayed on clear cuts, affecting watersheds, how our forests, proper right here in Clatsop County, sequester extra CO2 per acre than another forest on the planet, however are being mowed down by the very best bidder.

His articles contact the various dimensions of {our relationships} with the forests — their splendor, refined communication methods, therapeutic energy, historical past, balanced indigenous stewardship, administration methods designed to maximise revenue, the vital actuality of shedding our mature forests that mitigate local weather change, of shedding contact with ourselves.

He wrote letters to the editor frequently. He by no means let up.

Roger that, I texted him when he invited me to a forest assembly after I met him. My eco-education was starting. How can we get the phrase out as artists? What if we allowed the forests to talk for themselves by means of the visions and voices of artists and poets, economists and scientists? How would the tales, by means of numerous languages, create new conversations, analysis, administration fashions?

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We invited Clatsop Community College Librarian Dan McClure into the inquiry and co-designed Forest Visions, a two-year group mission to create an eco-education mannequin with artwork and storytelling on the coronary heart, designed to harmonize forest and human methods.

We began with a roundtable and invited a set of individuals working, dwelling in, finding out, the forests and the ecosystems. We would start with a single story, a soul story. We would construct eco-education by means of tales and pictures and the knowledge of expertise. I facilitated. Please describe a reminiscence of your relationship to a tree. The circle of tales was riveting, however Roger’s received to me. I discovered my notes from his story.

Tree saved me
When mother and father disappeared
nook of the lot
Trauma steady
He spoke of the tree that nurtured him as a younger boy, and he wept.

Roger was linked with folks all around the state and arrange a speaker sequence with distinguished voices in science, economics, design, sustainable forestry administration. Dan organized movie screening and workshops. We invited Kim Stafford, a onetime poet laureate of Oregon, to show and launch his new assortment of poetry, a collaboration with the faculty, public library, and Astoria Writer’s Guild.

Roger invited Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, retired curator of Northwest artwork on the Portland Art Museum, to curate a present on the Royal Nebeker Gallery at Astoria’s Clatsop Community College. He labored with Michael Granger, proprietor of LightBox images gallery, the images hub of Astoria, to create a list of the artists chosen by Bonnie, together with their mission statements: Robert Adams, Michael Brophy, Lee Imonen, Kim Osgood, Rita Robillard, Laura Ross-Paul.

Bonnie’s curatorial assertion opens this fashion:

Pacific Northwest Forests are darkish, moist, and aromatic. The earth is clothed with fir, hemlock, and purple cedar. Beneath the expansion, beds of sword fern and salal make a lush carpet over the renewing rot of fallen timber and random forest litter. In the spring trillium are sprinkled by means of the undergrowth like tiny, inverted pink-white stars, glowing beneath the dense umbrella of limbs. This is a imaginative and prescient of the previous forests. Then there are the clear-cuts, unfold patchwork-like, affected by stumps and humped with burn piles.

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I moderated a night with famend photographer and author Robert Adams and Kim Stafford.

Robert started: “I don’t want to be here. My pictures are ugly. My father stood before the city council of Astoria for years and begged them not to cut down the forests. We need to be grieving.”

You may hear a pin drop.

Forest Visions made some noise. The timber business, an enormous donor for the faculty, caught on, so the mission was nipped within the bud, after which Covid arrived. But the mission planted seeds, and Roger saved the articles flowing and the stress on; saved educating and alerting us. And he handed the activist torch to artist-environmentalist Anna Kaufman, contemporary from Vassar, who spearheaded the Astoria chapter of North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection for 2 years, together with Pam Birmingham and Nancy Webster. These powerhouse girls labored carefully with Roger to construct a letter-writing marketing campaign that helped cease a clearcut, sponsor movies, a Forest Poetry occasion, go out flyers at markets, preserve the motion in movement.

Anna Kaufman: “I first met Roger while conducting interviews for my college thesis project, exploring the issue of clearcutting in Clatsop County. We sat in the living room of his home, and in that very deep, wise voice of his, he told me of the severance tax, the timber industry’s funding of school curriculum, and of agent orange. Roger had a tenacious spirit that encouraged my understanding of activism as an ongoing, messy process, rather than a finite and result-oriented effort. Up until the last months of his life, he had a dedication to education, creativity, and community wellbeing which allowed for the possibility of hope in the darkest of times.”

I went to see Robert and Kerstin Adams about Roger’s legacy, asking the query I proceed to ask. How can we get the message out — make Roger’s physique of labor accessible to everybody? People in Portland nonetheless don’t know what’s happening out right here.

“No one has any passion.” Robert was speaking about leaders who won’t stand as much as the timber business’s outsized energy. “Have you walked in a clear cut for an hour and a half?” he requested me. “I have not,” I mentioned. “Do it and listen. You won’t hear any sound.” He paused. “I would give anything…money, reputation…to save a hundred acres of these forests.”

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Oregon has the worst document of the entire Western states — worse than right-wing Idaho — concerning forest practices, a state that was the greenest. In the last decade since I moved to Astoria, clear cuts have accelerated, despite the science and the very actual existential threats from local weather change.

Robert sits ahead in his chair. “We need a revolutionary book, a small book, free or $5, a summary, some photos, a strong message, not just information, but a call to action, like Mao’s Little Red Book!”

I’m sitting subsequent to Kerstin on the sofa, and we each perk up. “Yes! like Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book,” I say. “You need a good title,” she says.

Imagine a pocket-sized abstract of what’s actually happening in Oregon’s forests, learn how to cease this genocide of nature, restore wholesome forests, restore wholesome states of thoughts. Imagine the coalitions of activist organizations and people performing to stress the Oregon Legislature to reinstate the “severance tax,” a harvest tax eradicated within the ’90s by business lobbyists in Salem, that might deliver billions of {dollars} again into the general public coffers to maneuver towards a brand new imaginative and prescient of how we develop our tradition in relationship to our timber.

Roger introduced popcorn for film night time at Annie and Franko’s. Jim Jarmusch + Charlie Chaplin. We laughed and talked and argued, loved a glass of scotch. He and Dan performed Ping Pong. I seemed into his blue eyes the day he handed over. “Thank you for coming.” He was thanking Franko and me. Roger, expensive good friend and comrade with huge quantities of affection. Revolutionary Love. Thank you for being you.

I’m blessed to have realized from and collaborated with this mighty, humble man of the timber and rivers, a person born to inform their tales.

His final article for Hipfish was titled Salmon, Forests, and the Circle of Life.

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“Readers may be asking what the fate of the salmon has to do with forests; it’s a story of the interconnectedness of life”: He describes this dance of life and the salmon as “a keystone species; one whose presence or absence has an impact on an entire ecosystem.”

That’s Roger, a keystone species member who spawned an enormous imaginative and prescient. At the tip of his Rogue River e book he imagines the river talking to a salmon preventing currents to return residence to the spawning grounds:

“I will tell you my final secret to soothe you in your time of dying,” the river tells the salmon. “You and I are one, and your journey has all been a dream.”

***

Text from Robert DiFranco’s eulogy for Roger, conversations, emails from colleagues and buddies, poetry, articles from Hipfish Monthly, and my very own expertise of collaborating with Roger, who walked his speak, who put his eco-imagination into motion. 

Remembering Roger Dorband

• What: Exhibit of Dorband’s images
• Where: RiverSea Gallery, 1160 Commercial St., Astoria
• When: Through February 10, 2026