Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Robert Pledge represents a moment in photography, historically speaking, that he says has come and gone.

"You were discovering the world," he said one recent morning over a cup of tea at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, where he was overseeing

"People anywhere in the world could read Life magazine and read and see about parts of the world they would never go to.

"But today those stories are not told, because there is little to be discovered in visual terms, and because what is represented visually is a representation of what is happening right now, this minute - and then it's gone."

In its heyday, Contact - based in New York and Paris - used the supersonic Concorde the way photographers today use the Internet. Film shot in Europe could be put on the airplane at 11 in the morning, Paris time, and arrive in New York by 9 a.m. Eastern the same day.

"The only way we could make deadline for Time or Newsweek was the Concorde," he said. "It was an extraordinary airplane."

Today's digital photography is something else again, Pledge said, comparing it, a bit disdainfully, to instant coffee.

"Some people like instant coffee better than real coffee," he said. "But photography has been taken over by a different approach.

"It's less reflective and more immediate. The sort of magic that Life and Look and later on Time and Newsweek had - that no longer exists."

What is replacing it, he argues, is photography such as the nearly anonymous soldier's photographs of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib.

"Those images belong to our historical legacy," he said. "They will be in museums someday."

Pledge, a stocky, energetic man of 66, grew up in England and France, the son of an English father and French mother.

He studied anthropology and African languages. It was while he was in prison in Chad with a photographer and a film cameraman for five weeks in the early 1970s that he became interested in photography.

"As an anthropologist I was totally mesmerized" by their conversation, he said.

After his release he found a job editing a visual arts magazine, Zoom, in Paris.

There he met and worked with such legendary photographers as Jacques Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Pledge selected the photos in this exhibition, which is being put on during the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Eugene, with an eye toward the photograph as art.

Looking over his partner Burnett's famous photo of Eugene long distance runner Mary Decker Slaney's fall in the 1984 Olympics, he maintains that Decker's fame, at least in part, rests on the success of that photograph.

"The main reason she is remembered is because of the fall," he said, "and because the fall was recorded in such an extraordinary image."

Art preview

Faster, Higher, Farther: The Spirit of Track-and-Field Sports

What: Photographs by David Burnett, Kenneth Jarecke, Annie Leibovitz and Dilip Mehta; curated by Robert Pledge

Where: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 1430 Johnson Lane, on the University of Oregon campus

When: Through Sept. 1

Reception: 6 p.m. Wednesday. Free.

Other shows opening at the Schnitzer

"Edward Burtynsky, The China Series": Photographs of contemporary China;

"The Thinking Body": Contemporary work from American, European and Asian metalsmiths, jewelers and artists

When: Both exhibits run through Sept. 7