The story of Blue Sky Gallery, Portland’s lone photography gallery, is the tangled history of modern photography itself. When it opened in 1975, the gallery broke from so-called art photography’s very still, large-format, solemn pictures. Suburban snapshots held equal footing with Ansel Adams landscapes. As casual, documentary-style images gained respect across the country (most famously at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York), Blue Sky became a regional, progressive hub. But in reality, its goals were hardly so organized. Christopher Rauschenberg, one of the gallery’s five cofounders and its board president, saw it as a “honey pot.” He jokes about creating a place to lure photographers passing through town so he and his friends could meet them.

This October, 50 years after opening, Blue Sky began a yearlong celebration of its history, spanning five individual shows; the second runs December 4–27, and the rest open in February, May, and July. Drawing on Blue Sky shows from each decade chronologically, the shows are a wonderful kind of grab bag. In October, The First Ten Years captured some of the early days’ upstart, experimental spirit, putting Walker Evans photos next to recontextualized images from the American Museum of Natural History Archives (including one of a giant millipede). It was packed with hundreds of images by dozens of photographers, including Rauschenberg and his cofounders, Robert Di Franco, Craig Hickman, Ann Hughes, and Terry Toedtemeier.

Touring the opening, former Portland Art Museum chief curator Bruce Guenther spoke about Blue Sky’s particular influence. An art gallery creates a different context and reverence than a social media feed or magazine or newspaper, but showing especially documentary photos and portraits in a gallery—subjects we’re used to scrolling past but not really looking at—holds a distinct power to rewire impressions and perspectives. “We’ve all been going through a lesson,” Guenther told a crowd gathered in one of the space’s two large galleries. Blue Sky’s exceptionally diverse and enthusiastic curation, Guenther went on, has served as “a training program to see these photographs.”

The gallery has always run as a collective and as a nonprofit. Its mission is simply to convey the power and importance of photographs—any kind of photograph. It’s shown work by the landmark Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, known for the impactful outsider’s viewpoint he featured in his book The Americans, and Mary Ellen Mark, whose warm street photography brought empathy to the fringes of society. Later household names include Nan Goldin, Jim Goldberg, and Richard Mosse. Free of the financial motivations of a commercial gallery, Blue Sky has also proudly mounted many photographers’ early or even debut shows. Goldberg might be one example: He showed pieces from his famed Rich and Poor series at Blue Sky in 1982, which became his breakout show at MOMA two years later. But more than catching rising stars, the bulk of the gallery’s work is about nurturing talent and platforming impactful projects, regardless of commercial potential.

Any artist can submit work to Blue Sky’s exhibitions committee, which meets weekly and mounts at least two shows each month. In contrast to pretty much every other museum and gallery, where the order is flipped and curators seek out artists, this democratic process helps up-and-comers score shows and often puts their work next to that of giants. To Guenther’s point, it also helps push the medium forward—that honey pot hoping to catch the best of everything made with a camera has been a rising tide for the wider industry.

Rauschenberg doesn’t jump to take credit, though he’s certainly down for the cause. “It was always like, Okay, what else can we do? What else can be accomplished?” he told me one afternoon in the gallery’s small public library of photo books. Curatorial focus sets Blue Sky apart from other community or artist-run spaces. There is no spirit of competition or overly ambitious sloganeering, but the gallery continues to attract the medium’s biggest artists. The group that formed around and maintains the gallery, the same growing and moving community that makes up its exhibitions committee, has always possessed the gravity to draw real talent, taste, and experience—all of which it hopes to pay forward, whether through financial support, mentorship, or simply existing as a free public institution constantly showing great photography.

Blue Sky’s current space along the Northwest Park Blocks, where it’s been since 2007, looks like a modern if somewhat humble museum. Concrete floors, crisp white walls, high, open ceilings. The two main galleries are large enough to hear your voice echo, and they command enough ceremonious respect to signal that you should probably whisper.

Its beginnings were humbler. In 1975, Rauschenberg and co. stumbled into a strip mall space on NW Lovejoy Street, sandwiched between a grocery, a laundromat, and a guru’s office. Rauschenberg talks about the time like there was a thriving photography scene. There was, but the galleries were far from glamorous. A hallway in Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, dubbed Camerawork Gallery with help from celebrated photographer Minor White, was hallowed ground, which gives some context of the demand. Photographers and photo nerds were desperate for gallery space.

“When we started the gallery, we didn’t think it was any big deal,” Rauschenberg said. “And almost immediately, we were getting show proposals from all over the country.” So what if the gallery was a sublet in the back of this or that space? Once fax machines became ubiquitous, they began hosting international shows. Toward the end of the ’80s, the gallery landed in a space on Northwest 12th and Hoyt, just as the industrial neighborhood was transforming into an artist’s row full of mixed-use real estate. Al Solheim, the arts philanthropist and developer known as the “father of the Pearl,” owned the building; the gallery hung out for 20 years on a sweetheart deal.

The Pearl is no artists’ bohemia today, though it remains the center of the city’s gallery scene. As the area gentrified, some galleries purchased their buildings while others were priced out. Blue Sky moved, but bought into the DeSoto, a redeveloped building that’s now one of the largest arts holdouts in the neighborhood, housing the Jewish Museum as well as the Froelick and Augen galleries. Without much in the way of revenue or enterprising financial backers, Blue Sky bought in through a characteristically scrappy whirlwind deal and fundraising campaign involving tax breaks, private donations, and the sale of a painting by Rauschenberg’s father, the artist Robert Rauschenberg.

In practice, the result feels refreshingly like a ’70s counterculture co-op operating under a fancy facade. That duality drew executive director Kristin Solomon, who joined Blue Sky in 2022 after a tenure leading the artist-run Blackfish Gallery. Solomon liked the gallery’s focus on making photography accessible to a wider audience, but also the ways photography itself blurs lines of art and documentary or reporting. Historically, this accessible nature has been a double-edged sword in the art world: Everyone understands a photograph on an information level, at least theoretically, which has made deciding what gives a photograph artistic merit an endless game of cat and mouse. Debates rattle over everything from subject matter to color versus black-and-white to film versus digital. Large-format glass plates once defined art photography. Now several prominent photographers proudly show unedited iPhone photos. “Blue Sky has always been about that risk-taking of like, Well, let’s show it, you know, and let other people decide what they think,” Solomon told me.

Solomon mentions the Israeli American photographer Zach Oren’s 2024 show, Ides of Gender, as an example. Oren traveled to 49 states over the better part of a decade to interview and photograph over 650 trans people for the project. One subject, Olivia, from Anchorage, Alaska, is 9; Micah, from Midland, Michigan, is 16; others are in their sixties. They span gender presentations, races, and social and professional affiliations. But represented in portraits hung in the gallery, next to interview excerpts recounting dehumanizing experiences of prejudice and violence, they are all distinctly human.

“It’s really easy to vote on a bill or whatever,” Solomon said. “It’s really hard to see somebody that you know and meet them and know their name and hear their story and then not feel compelled to have more understanding and compassion.”

Rauschenberg describes the gallery’s approach to activism as walking out in the middle of the street only to realize they were leading a parade. Though that’s not where the story ends. “You don’t create the parade,” Rauschenberg said. “People agreeing that what you’re doing is important creates the parade.”