I am on my way to Chicago to attend Conversations 2022, the annual conference of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art on April 8-10. The event is being held live again after a couple of years of virtual conferences made necessary by the pandemic. I look forward to seeing some old friends, meeting some new ones, and attending the many presentations that make up the conference schedule.
Read moreIn this short video, we look at a photograph by Walker Evans, who visited Edwards, Mississippi in 1936. From an elevated vantage point above the railroad tracks, he photographs the tracks running through town and creates an evocative portrait of a small southern town. Along with other photographers working under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration during the depression, Evans produced some of the most memorable images from this troubled time, work that assured his place among the master of American photography.
Edd Fuller, Editor
A few weeks before Christmas, my good friend Connor Taylor texted me, inviting me on a road trip to visit some of our friends in Pennsylvania during the first week of January, 2022. The first week of January? I thought he was crazy. All I could picture was our car sliding off the side of a cliff in the icy mountains and falling hundreds of feet into a dark, snowy abyss. Perhaps I am crazy myself, for after being informed that the Reading & Northern Railroad was on the list of places to visit, I agreed to come along without any further hesitation.
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Railroad architecture isn’t only stones and cement, iron and steel, vertical elevations and so on. It’s also the spirit, or as we may say, the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. And equally, it’s the culture of the lives that have used it.
If therefore you wanted to know more about major railroad stations with a long history, you could do worse than listen to the opening clip from a radio program called Grand Central Station. The program was sponsored by the Pillsbury Flour company and it aired until 1954. Every week, the listener was drawn into a world where the railroad and the station building intersected with human life.
Read moreIn this two minute video, we introduce Quick Takes, a short version of Talking Pictures where we look at a single work by a well know photographer. In this Quick Take, we look at “Meudon, 1928,” one of the best known photographs by André Kertész, which features a steam locomotive passing by high above a Paris street scene.
Edd Fuller, Editor
The Indigenous people who lived and thrived on the lakeshore called it Ha-AH-chu, meaning Little Lake. That name is remembered today by a vanishingly small number of speakers of the Duwamish language, Lushootseed. To the settlers and builders who supplanted the first people, it became, and still is, Lake Union. To railroaders, it was Region 4 of the Seattle Division. While that name is lost to time, a work of art remembers lakeshore life and the railroading that once was done there.
From nearly its earliest days, Seattle has been a railroad town. Locally mined coal, locally felled timber, locally produced cedar shingles, and silk fabrics imported from Asia by clipper ship were among the many products that transited the growing metropolis. War and economic boomtimes grew the railroads while economic busts, competitive modes of transportation and, most recently, gentrification have caused the presence of trains to shrink and become virtually invisible.
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