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 Jim Lommasson is a photographer, not a historian. When he began capturing images of the carousel at Oaks Park in Portland, Oregon, he was focused on shutter speed and lighting, not preserving the past.
As a college student in the 1970s, Lommasson often wandered through Oaks Park in the winter when the rides were closed and the park was deserted. Camera in hand, he would spend hours taking pictures of the colorful carousel animals. When he was given an assignment to shoot images that represented the T.S. Eliot poem “Burnt Norton,” he decided to return to the carousel. “Photographing the carousel animals didn’t make sense to the assignment,” recalls Lommasson, now 60. “While I was looking at the carousel, I noticed the faded images on the [center pole] that were strange and surreal.”
Lommasson took out his camera and began shooting, confident the faded images and peeling paint captured the essence of the poem, which starts with the lines:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
Once the assignment was complete, Lommasson packed the photos in a box and moved on to other projects. In the midst of photo shoots for print advertisements and corporate clients, though, he continued to think about the carousel images.
 In 1982, Lommasson unearthed the box of photos from the closet of his Portland home and began doing some research. He learned the Noah’s Ark carousel was built by the Herschell-Spillman Company and arrived at Oaks Park in 1923. European immigrants painted the original center pole with Edwardian-era images of Indian chiefs, Arabs riding camels, and well-dressed women. In 1944, when the first paintings were starting to fade, Wendell Corwin Chase and Waldo Spore Chase, brothers and artists from Washington State, were hired to paint colorful images of local landmarks like Mount Hood and Multnomah Falls on the center pole.
Pleasant Surprise
The images Lommasson was seeing were a combination of two sets of paintings. “Over time, the images took on a life of their own,” Lommasson recalls. “The paint had cracked and peeled off to reveal these natural double exposures that appealed to me as a photographer.” The official term for such a phenomenon is “pentimento,” defined as an alteration in painting, evidenced by traces of original work.
 In the images on the carousel at Oaks Park, it was possible to see a woman in a white dress, holding a parasol while a road loops around her ankles and knees toward the landmark Vista House that sits between her legs. Other images included a girl holding a doll while standing in a pool of water in the middle of a forest, and an Indian chief overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. “Some of the images were blended together to the point that it was impossible to tell whether they were predominantly the original images or the newer images,” Lommasson recalls.
Lommasson went back to Oaks Park to revisit the images often, each time noticing how time and the elements had changed them. Realizing their impermanence, he decided to photograph each one, creating a complete record. It wasn’t until he took a close look at the final images that Lommasson realized their importance.
“They are part of Portland history, part of carousel history, part of amusement park history, and deserved to be preserved,” Lommasson says. “I realized that the memory of these images would evaporate if they weren’t documented.”
A Part of History
Lommasson approached Oaks Park staff about preserving the images, hoping to ensure his photographs would not be the sole surviving record of their existence. Despite his pleas, a group of volunteers painted over each pentimento in 1985. Within the span of a few hours, a fresh coat of paint covered the images that had taken decades to create.
 “We’re a nonprofit amusement park and often we have to use what is available to us, which means the maintenance crew or the groundskeepers are using whatever paint is leftover from other projects to paint the carousel or touch up the other rides,” explains Mary Beth Coffey, senior manager at Oaks Park. “In this case, volunteers offered to come in and paint over the images, some of which were down to bare wood. There was no budget to preserve the images.”
Even though the original pentimenti didn’t survive, Lommasson had the images that marked their existence—and he was determined to share them. He brought his portfolio of photographs to Oaks Park for the first time in 2007. Until then, Coffey had no idea Lommasson had gone to such painstaking effort to capture the images on film.
“We are so fortunate that he preserved those images,” she says. “The carousel is the heartbeat of our park; it transports riders to another time and Jim has captured that for us.”
‘A Terrific Book’
Just months after he brought the photos to Oaks Park, Lommasson exhibited his work at the Portland Art Museum and decided he wanted to pursue options to publish the photos as part of a book. He attended a local writers’ festival with his portfolio in hand and showed the pictures to Tom Booth, the associate director of Oregon State University (OSU) Press.
“I had read an article [about Lommasson and his photographs of Oaks Park] and thought, ‘This would make such a terrific book,’” Booth recalls. “A few months later, when I had all but forgotten about the article, Jim was standing in front of me, showing me his work.”
Though the newspaper article featured a few photographs of the carousel and a pentimento, Booth was in awe of the pictures when he saw the entire collection. He knew right then he wanted to publish the book.
In 2009, OSU Press released “Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art.” At the same time the book hit bookstore shelves, Lommasson debuted an exhibit of the photographs at the New American Art Union in Portland. Both the book and the exhibit generated significant buzz locally and nationwide. Lommasson has sold several prints of the images, which retail for $800, but he is cautious about selling the entire portfolio of originals.
“I am hoping that donors step forward to purchase the portfolio and donate it to the Portland Art Museum or the Oregon Historical Society,” he says. “The photos are part of Portland history, and I want them to end up in the archives of one of those institutions.”
Lasting Impression
It’s been almost three decades since Lommasson photographed the images that surrounded the center pole of the carousel at Oaks Park. In that time, he’s become an award-winning artist and photographer whose work has been exhibited at museums around the nation. Even though he’s moved on to other projects—his latest is “Exit Wounds: Life After War–Soldier’s Stories,” a book project and traveling exhibit of photographs that document the lives of American war veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan—he still thinks about the surreal images on the carousel.
“I feel like these images are Portland’s Pompeii and needed to be preserved,” he says. “I realized that the memories of these strange, beautiful images that just happened over time would evaporate if I didn’t capture them. The images are part of our communal family album, and I’m grateful that I was able to put them out there for others to see.”
Jodi Helmer launched her writing career in Portland, Oregon, where she once rode the carousel at Oaks Park. She can be reached at jodi@jodihelmer.com.
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