Unlike most industries with a footprint measured in square feet, or perhaps several acres, the railroad reaches out into the American landscape to touch lonely rural outposts, big cities, and small towns. The railroad pushes over mountains and through uninhabited deserts. It spans rivers and streams as it stitches the country together with steel rails. And every place the railroad touches is changed by it, and the railroad is altered by each place it passes through.
It has always seemed to me appropriate that we store our digital images on a “memory card.” Digital photographs are stored in electronic memory in much the same way that our brain stores electrical impulses as memory. Whether electronic or neurological, memory is ephemeral. Digital memory can be corrupted, erased or rendered inaccessible by changing technology. And, over time human memory becomes unreliable, fades and is forgotten.
Digital photographs have no physical reality and can be viewed only with the aid of a digital device. Much like our own memories, they simply do not exist in the real world.
Last month I made a road trip south. In planning for photography along the way, I followed the railroads, because the railroad often runs through the most interesting parts of town; the older industrial districts where the buildings are from earlier time and show the signs of age and neglect.
The Center for Railroad Photography & Art has announced the publication of a new book, The Railroad and the Art of Place An Anthology. Featuring the work of twenty-five contemporary photographers as well as a selection of historic photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, the book is a rich and evocative exploration of the railroad’s impact on the visual and cultural landscape of America.
This book is inspired by and expands upon the theme introduced by David Kahler in his earlier work, The Railroad and the Art of Place, which we reviewed in 2016 and you can read here.
This video is a recording of a panel discussion that presents an overview of the book including a selection of images and a discussion of the concepts that underlies the “art of place” and how these ideas shaped the work. I was honored to have a small role in the creation of the book and to be included among the panelists.
The Railroad and the Art of Place An Anthology is available for pre-order (click here) and will begin shipping on November 1st.
I watched the sun and clouds race across the mountains while I tried to decide if conditions were favorable for photography on this Sunday afternoon in January, 2020. Time was already short when I finally picked up my camera bag and headed out the door.
Harrisonburg, Virginia is across the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley. The Orange, Alexandria and Manassas RR reached Harrisonburg in 1868. The town was an important industrial center in the northern Shenandoah Valley and over the years was served by numerous railroads including the Baltimore & Ohio, Southern and Chesapeake Western. Norfolk Southern has a presence in Harrisonburg and the Shenandoah Valley Railroad operates the line from Staunton, Virginia to Pleasant Valley, just south of Harrisonburg. The history of the railroad in Harrisonburg is written in a stretch of tracks through a faded industrial landscape just west of downtown.
Larry McMurtry, the American author who wrote so eloquently about the changing West, died on March 25, 2021, at the age of eighty-four. He is perhaps best known for the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, but he published both fiction and non-fiction over a long and prolific career. From his first novel, Horseman Pass By, here is a beautiful and evocative description of a warm evening on a Texas ranch, sitting on the porch watching the train go by as the day fades.
“Granddad was an old man then, and he worked hard days. By eight or eight-fifteen he was tired of sitting up. Around that time the nightly Zephyr flew by, blowing its loud whistle to warn the station men in Thalia. The noise cut across the dark prairie like the whistling train itself. I could see the hundred lighted windows of the passenger cars, and I wondered where in the world the people behind them were going night after night. To me it was exciting to think about a train. But the Zephyr blowing by seemed to make Granddad tireder; it seemed to make him sad. He told me one time that it reminded him of nights on roundup, long years ago. On quiet nights he and the other cowboys would sit around the fires, telling stories or drawing brands in the dirt. Some nights they would camp close to a railroad track, and a train would go by and blow its whistle at the fires. Sometimes it scared the cattle, and sometimes it didn’t, but it always took the spirit out of the cowboys’ talk; made them lonesomer than they could say. It made them think about womenfolk and fun and city lights till they could barely stand it. And long years after, when the last train would go by, Granddad got restless. He would stretch, and push his old rope-bottom chair up against the house. ‘Train’s gone, son,’ he said to me. ‘It’s bedtime.‘”
