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Wooden Boat Festival to relaunch recovered maritime photos
Photographic gems mined from a prized collection of photographs chronicling mid-20th-century vessels on Northwest waters premieres Saturday, Sept. 6, at Port Townsend’s annual Wooden Boat Festival.
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The photos are among the first results of an ongoing Gig Harbor BoatShop project begun earlier this year to digitize some 10,000 images captured on glass plates and film by Tacoma-based photographer Kenneth “Kenny” Ollar between the 1920s and 1980s.
Kenneth Ollar photograph courtesy of Guy Hoppen/Gig Harbor BoatShop
The collection features individual and group portraits of recreational, racing, and commercial craft as well as a sprinkling of other maritime and landscape subjects.
Newly digitized images will be shown as part of public presentation scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on the festival’s Discovery Stage. Presenters will be BoatShop volunteer Jan Hein and former Notre Dame professor Richard Gray, a BoatShop board member.
Gray, a leader of the digitation project, told Gig Harbor Now last week that the showing marks the project’s “public launch,” giving attendees a glimpse of views “perhaps never seen.”
“We continue to discover new things,” he said before adding coyly, “including a few nice surprises.”
Visit the festival website for ticket pricing and information about the festival, which runs Friday through Sunday, Sept. 5 through 7.
Kenny Ollar. Photo credit: Zebeck, GHB Photo Archive