East Broad Top Railroad – Photograph Copyright 2018 by Edd Fuller
Saving Our Past
I have been thinking about the role of photography in historic preservation lately.
This summer, plans were announced to widen the intersection in a crossroads town here in the county where I live. The change will require the destruction of an old wooden store building, and it is the last vestige of the town as it once was. After the “improvements” are completed, there will be nothing left but a post office, and a four-lane highway lined with fast food restaurants and gas stations. Read more
We stand on the shoulders of the great men and women who have gone before. Their legacy is a gift that lights our way forward.
The first in our Legacies series of videos features the work of William Henry Jackson who lived from 1843 to 1942 and was one of the first photographers to extensively record the early days of railroading. For a little more background information, see here.
If you haven’t visited our YouTube channel, check it out. We are just getting started but plan to have more video content in the coming months. If you enjoy seeing this type of work, let us know by subscribing to our channel.
Mexican Central Railway train at station – between 1880 and 1897
It is often said that knowledge and art advance as we stand on the shoulders of the great men and women who have gone before. Their legacy is a gift that lights our way forward.
Legacies are built on legacies, and in a new series of videos, we will meet some of the photographers who influence and inspire. Some of these photographers are well known, perhaps even legendary, but others are more personal, a father or mentor who helped us see the possibilities, and how to realize them. Read more
A while back, a friend said to me that in his opinion, black and white is the color of railroading. I didn’t disagree. When we look at well known railroad photographers, most all of them worked in black and white. Richard Steinheimer, Jim Shaughnessy, Philip Hastings, O.Winston Link, David Plowden and many others produced outstanding bodies of work in black and white. In fact, there was a time that I would have said that the color of photography is black and white. Most of the great photographers that I admire worked in black and white. Of course, part of the reason for the predominance of black and white is that color came fairly late in the history of the medium.
Matthew Malkiewicz is a widely recognized photographer who specializes in steam railroading history, or as he says, “keeping a window to the past open for us to see.” His work has appeared in both print and online venues, and he is the recipient of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art’s prestigious John E. Gruber Creative Photography Award. He is a Hasselblad Masters of Photography 2016 finalist, and has been published on CNN International, The Weather Channel, DPReview and PetaPixel websites. Most recently he was an honorable mention in the 2017 Monochrome Awards in both the professional fine art and landscape categories. His work is currently featured in a gallery exhibition, “The Art of Trains,” at Old Dominion University through July 15, 2018. A resident of New Jersey who has also called California and Colorado home, Matthew is the senior resident electrical designer at a petroleum refinery. His entire portfolio can be viewed at the popular “Lost Tracks of Time” website.
The First Gift of Christmas at the Reading & Northern Railroad, PennsylvaniaRead more
“We worked like thieves, stealing images as train riders do, from that passing world unmasked by the railroad whose intrusion helped create it. A corridor of random and disordered beauty, the backs of buildings, a space where nothing is posed. You would walk here as a trespasser, stepping over weeds and cracked pavement, past a rusty fence, a chained dog, a string of white laundry, a man fixing his truck, a woman lying in the sun.” – Michael Flanagan, Stations: An Imagined Journey
Town of Shenandoah, Virginia – I will see this train again later in the afternoon at Dovel Hollow
Saturday afternoon found me over in the valley again. Here in central Virginia, “the valley” is understood to mean the Shenandoah Valley which is “over” on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains from where I live. A year and a half ago, I began working on a project to photograph a few miles of railroad that runs between Elkton and Front Royal on part of what is now Norfolk Southern’s Shenandoah Valley line.
It was a pleasant early spring day. Some snow still lingered on the north facing slopes of the mountains, but in the valley the fields were beginning to turn green, and the trees were just starting to show some spring color. In the Town of Shenandoah, I stopped in the NS yard office and asked if it was OK to take some pictures (it was) and found out that a northbound freight was leaving soon. Read more
