Road Trip – Part Four
Southern Colorado, New Mexico, Texas
Editor’s Notebook
Road Trip – Part Three
Colorado
I drove out of Kansas and into Colorado on an overcast afternoon. Later that day, I would arrive in Denver to spend a few days visiting my sister. Not much time for stops along the way, but while looking for a place to eat lunch, I came across the Limon Heritage Museum and Railroad Park in Limon, Colorado. The Museum is housed in the former Rock Island depot, which was built in 1910. Unfortunately, the Museum was closed the day I was there, but I was able to walk around the grounds and take pictures.
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Road Trip – Part One
It started with plans to drive to Chicago to attend the Center for Railroad Photography & Art’s yearly conference. The trip quickly expanded to drive across the prairie states to Colorado, from there to Santa Fe and then back east through New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee to arrive back home some 4700 miles and three weeks later. As much as possible, I stayed away from the Interstate Highways and followed the tracks through the small towns that once defined life in America.
My Father’s Streets
The exit sign on the Interstate pointed to Montgomery and I turned onto a two-lane West Virginia road that I imagine had changed very little from the days when my grandparents lived in Montgomery. My father graduated from Montgomery High School during the war (WWII) and went into the Navy, where he served in the Pacific. My grandfather worked in the mines and when Dad came back from the service, they were living in Virginia.
Montgomery is a railroad town, and at one time was a major shipping point for coal mined in the Kanawha Valley. In the late 1800s, the town’s growth was spurred by the construction of the Kanawha & Michigan Railroad. By the 1940s, when my dad lived there, Montgomery was served by the Chesapeake & Ohio. Today the CSX Kanawha Subdivision and Amtrak run through Montgomery.
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Road Trip
Jefferson City, Tennessee – October, 2021
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.
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Haystacks
You may be wondering what haystacks have to do with railroads and photography. I am going to get to that, but first let me explain how I think that looking at a wide variety of art and artists can bring new ideas and spark creativity in our own work. As photographers, we often become mildly obsessed with the latest gear and techniques that promise to “level up” our photography.
There is nothing wrong with gear and technique. They are essential to our craft, but they are only part of the picture. As we educate ourselves about the craft of photography, we must not neglect to train our eyes. We can do that not only by studying the work of other photographers, but also by looking at and learning from all the visual arts. Stepping outside the world of railroad photography, our visual sensibility is enhanced when we see the world through the eyes of artists working in different media. I love to look at and study the work of the great railroad photographers, but I also explore and learn from the work of “non-railroad” photographers and other visual artists. Learning to see is a lifelong journey.
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Community
This past October, I had the privilege of spending a day of photography with my friend Andy Morang. That’s him in the the photo, bending over his camera bag by the tracks in Monroe, Louisiana. Andy wrote about our day out on his blog, Urban Decay. We reprinted his post here a couple of weeks ago and he now has part two up. (See Part One and Part Two.)
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