Impressions from the Past
By Jessica Zillgitt, Staff Writer

     Christina Mittleider darted into the middle of the street in rhythm with a flashing stoplight. She lined up her camera lens in the exact position and lighting that photographer O.E. Flaten had used when he placed his camera in the same spot more than 120 years ago when he captured photographs of Moorhead. Mittleider was attempting to illustrate the drastic societal and architectural changes Moorhead has undergone since Flaten’s day.
     Flaten, a Norwegian immigrant who moved to southern Minnesota to work on a farm, took a job with a photographer in Rochester, MN, before moving to Moorhead in 1879. Flaten’s career change was motivated by the move to Fargo by Moorhead’s only photographer at the time, F. Jay Haynes, leaving Moorhead without a photographer.
     Between his arrival in 1879 and the end of his career in 1929, Flaten managed to gather a collection of more than 800 images of businesses, street scenes and events in Moorhead. In addition to his collection of Moorhead scenes, Mark Peihl, Clay County archivist, recalls a 1914 newspaper article in which Flaten mentioned a collection of more than 100,000 negatives of portraits he also took during the same period.
     Flaten was primarily a commercial photographer who concentrated on portraits. On occasion he would be contracted by owners to photograph their buildings and properties. In addition, Flaten was responsible for taking photographs for postcards of Moorhead. Peihl also suggests that Flaten was using his photography to record history, recording the date and other relevant information on the negative.
     Several years after Flaten’s 1933 death, the entire country began to see a movement that would greatly influence city life as the rural to urban shift began to spread across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
     According to Peihl, compared to similarly populated cities across the country, Moorhead was one of the most affected. Moorhead experienced its most drastic change in March 1973, when the majority of the downtown area was torn down and the buildings were replaced by structures with more modern architectural characteristics.

Impressions from the Past Continued............

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