(Full Disclosure: I have previously collaborated with Joel Jensen, the photographer for this book, for a lengthy essay in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin, and am presently working with him on a book proposal of my own. My views, therefore, are not entirely objective.)

The railroad, and especially the steam locomotive, has been profound to the American culture. Especially in the Western regions of the U.S., where the railroad was integral to the development of modern civilization, the steam locomotive’s memory lives on in the collective imagination, despite the fact that the such machines ceased to be a meaningful force in the region’s economy more than half a century ago. Their endurance has something to do with their now foreign technological nature — they are devices with their workings on the outside, crude yet elegant mechanical marvels that seem to breathe, seem to have a pulse, seem to be alive. Across the country, dozens upon dozens of steam locomotives survive in working order, cared for by loving and often unpaid crews, and run on numerous tourist and museum railroads. Many photo books on this subjects have been published — the steam locomotive with its built-in special effects is a sort-of camera magnet, after all — but few manage to rise beyond being overwrought photo albums. There is always something slightly treacly, slightly forced about these books, possibly because there is often something of the same nature in their subjects, a feeling of canned history. Yet somehow, Joel Jensen has created a work that surpasses these, a book that shows us preserved steam as merely a continuation of an unbroken tradition going back to the workaday, pre-digital world. In Steam: An Enduring Legacy, Jensen gives us not only a glimpse into a harder, grittier, sweatier side of preserved steam, but also a work of excellent photography that stands as an artistic achievement in its own right.

The book is not a guidebook but an extended photographic journey through the survivors of the steam era. It begins with an essay by writer-photographer Scott Lothes, who provides a brief introduction to the cultural importance of the steam locomotive. The essay tells us the basics, but to anyone with knowledge of railroad history it will provide little new; clearly this is meant as a primer for the uninitiated, and it serves this job well. Following this, the bulk of the photographs appear in a gallery section. Unlike more conventional books in this genre, the photos are not sequenced by time or place. Most of these images are displayed one-per-page, with healthy white margins at all sides. After the photograph section of the book is another essay, this time by John Gruber, founder and president of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. Gruber relates an overview of preservation and the steam locomotive, including some interesting tidbits about early, 19th century preservation movements and an able survey of contemporary efforts. He completes his essay with an overview of photography’s relationship with the preserved steam locomotive. An afterword penned by photographer Jeff Brouws follows, with an apt assessment of Jensen’s photographic style. A page of acknowledgements from Jensen complete the work.

I am intimately familiar with the tourist and heritage railway world, and so, despite my respect for the photographer and the authors, I was not anticipating this book to be particularly impressive. Aiding me in this pre-judgement was my familiarity with other works on this subject, as described above. I could not, in the end, have been more wrong. This work is a success that it transcends subject matter interest, and would serve to appeal even to the least nostalgic of railroad enthusiasts, if only they can be convinced to pick it up and look through it past its opening pages.

For these first few pages in, it is all billowing steam and dramatic light, and one might begin to fear that this will be yet one more album in the tradition of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, pleasant in a strawberry milkshake sort of way but not particularly memorable in its own right. It’s not that these dramatic images are bad: they are neither technically nor artistically flawed, but they are also of a genre that is not unfamiliar. But then, on page 22, it all changes in a characteristic Jensen fashion. The photo here, of two large steam locomotives and their long train of passenger cars silhoutted against a damp sky, is one of my favorites from this photographer, and I am disappointed at how small that the image runs in this book; nevertheless it breaks through the romantic bombast and begins a pattern of complex variety that marks this book as something special. Opposite this image is another fine stand-out, an image showing the roughshod nature of narrow gauge railroads, with a wandering pair of steel rails, barely any ties showing, splayed out through a ramshackle landscape, a tiny locomotive working hard to traverse the route. All darks and midtones, with barely a fleck of highlight anywhere, the image is teeth-gnashing and evocative.

The human aspect of these survivors is not neglected, and may in fact be one of the volume’s chief strengths. The careful inclusion of crewmen and other workers is a key aspect of this book’s DNA. From trackworkers hammering in spikes, to groundlings passing hand signals, to roundhouse monkeys wrestling with the oversize parts of these steel behemoths, people are a subtle but integral part to the visual story Jensen lays out for us. Sometimes they are ghostly figures, caught at work amidst the steam, while at other times, such as with a Durango and Silverton crew shown in a photo on page 57, they are cocky, defensive, weary, and proud, staring straight at the camera for a portrait the likes of which is as old as the relationship between the steam locomotive and cameras. Other similarly successful images include a portrait of a crewman for the ATSF 3751 on page 81, a Mount Rainier Scenic engineer on page 124, and mechanical workers from the Durango on 134 and 159. In some cases, these people wear the clothes of railroaders and shop workers for a century, bibs and long-sleeved work shirts and hard steel-toed boots, but in others they sport plastic hard hats and, in the case of the last of these images, modern wrap-around sunglasses. Often, photographers of contemporary steam seek to exclude such modern details, to try and recreate some sense of what they think the past was like, favoring costumes and playacting. Jensen here rejects this, and comes out with material that is intensely modern yet intensely authentic in ways that those seeking the Colonial Williamsburg of steam railroading always fail to achieve. These men look like the railroaders of the past because they are the railroaders of the past, and things like modern sunglasses don’t break the effect because such little trappings cannot contradict authenticity.

Failings? Few. One minor quibble is that the book is exclusively western material, but the book does not strongly acknowledge this regional focus. This said, the book is subtitled as “the railroad photographs of Joel Jensen,” and Joel is a creature of the West, a photographer who is constantly roaming, constantly alone, and who sees the world through different eyes. And in the end, the artistic achievement of the photographer’s work makes complaints about his geographic biases seem trivial.

Overall production values are high, as one would expect in a book from a leading publisher such as Norton. That said, there are a few minor quibbles. The paper seems a tad thinner than I am used to expecting in such a book, so that when darker images are followed by a large white space on the next page, a very faint ghost can be read through the paper. It is, however, barely perceptible, and did not significantly detract from my enjoyment of the book. As for the photos themselves, reproduction is generally of high quality. There are times when I expected more shadow detail, but this is a common failing of black-and-white reproduction in printed matter, and overall Norton has done a great job with this. My only significant quibble with reproduction is with some of the larger images displayed across the gutter; a few, such as the image of an ATSF steam engine passing behind a graveyard on pages 70 and 71, appear rather soft, as if the prints had been scanned and then displayed larger than their original size.

This book at the end of the day is not at all about what it will be labelled as: it is not a photography book about tourist and heritage steam railroads. Instead, it is a book about undying tradition. No work has ever made contemporary steam more noble, more enviable, or harder work. The contradictions and anachronisms of these surviving steam locomotives and the crew that care for them are captured nakedly in Jensen’s photos, showing us something precious, something that is not at all playacting, but instead an unbroken thread to the relationship between man and steam that began on this continent in Antebellum times. This book will be of especial interest to those who appreciate steam locomotives, the interplay of railroads and geography, and the photography of railroads.

Steam: An Enduring Legacy: The Railroad Photographs of Joel Jensen is available from Amazon and Powell’s Books.

All things must pass, however. With more and more writing and photography in the works, having a URL of my name became more and more obviously the smart choice, and hanging onto route99west.com became a less and less defensible bit of sentimentality.

So with this post, I am announcing that route99west.com is being wound down, and all its content will now, and likely for a long time to come, be located at alexcraghead.com. This includes The Addendum, now to be found under a new URL, but the same folder: alexcraghead.com/addendum/. The design has been heavily redone as well, with far larger pictures, a slightly slicker gallery function, a bit of juggled organization, and a new section on in-process projects. I anticipate that alexcraghead.com will be a bit more dynamic than route99west.com was.

In the next few weeks, I will remove the old content from route99west.com. The domain I will keep, however — I can’t bear to part with it, though I don’t know what I will use it for. In the meanwhile, update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions, and welcome to the new site.

Should photographers think more like a guerilla?

Recently, I wrote here questioning the ways that photography is displayed and shared with the public. My basic premise: that the typical ways that photography is shared — the gallery wall, the publication, the web site — are not necessarily the best ways to serve the messages any given set of photographs is meant to undertake.  At the time, I pondered if there might be better ways, and here I want to outline some different possible answers. By no means are these definitive or complete. In fact many of them may be downright impractical. Still, I think that photographers would be well served to consider thinking outside the box, and maybe some of these ideas might spur some better ones.

Billboards. Imagine placing important photographs up on large commercial billboard space. What might the cost be? Would it run more or less than putting on a typical 10+ image gallery show, and/or last about as long? For that matter, how does it compare to the cost of most self-published book runs? And imagine, although only one image could be shown, it would be seen by thousands of people each day, of all walks of life and all sorts of positions in society. Before, dear reader, you dismiss the idea as crazy, consider: some artists are already doing this.

Online multimedia videos. Although I’m discussing the sharing of still images, multimedia presentations combining audio and still images — especially if accompanied by well done and appropriately crafted narration — can be a powerful effect. There’s a reason why Apple’s iMovie has a built-in effect known as the Ken Burns effect. Faced with making films about eras of American history that predated movie cameras, Burns found ways to combine still images, music, and narration to powerful effect. And video is one of the most popular methods of entertainment on the web, as evidenced by the strength of YouTube‘s hit counts. A compelling multimedia presentation has potential to reach audiences who would otherwise not feel engaged by a conventional web thumbnail gallery of still images. (I made one for the Portland Switching District Project.)

Temporary projection. Fellow writer Dan Haneckow mentioned this idea to me while we were working together on an architectural history project. Using a digital projector, images — in our original concept images of buildings that are now gone — could be projected onto structures or other large surfaces. Imagine a rotating series of images displayed against the blank wall of a building, or even downward against pavement. While temporary, such displays would draw huge amounts of attention from all manner of people, hooking them in to see what the image is and understand its significance. 

Guerilla publication. While the conventional bound book has a place and a value, it has limited reach, thanks in part to its high cost. Imagine instead publications of small size, but made free. Sure, printing and selling postcards has been around forever, but who says there has to be a price-tag? Imagine hundreds, even thousands of postcard sized prints, left randomly at bookstores, coffee shops, community centers, libraries — anywhere, really. No, nobody will make money off this deal, but free stuff gets taken, and maybe in the process those photos will live on in people’s homes or places of work, where they will be seen, appreciated, and perhaps understood. For a little more, small 4-8 page booklets could also be produced to the same purpose, with even greater likelihood of being kept and appreciated. 

What other unconventional ways might photos be shared, and therefore find meaning and purpose?

Skylines and the Grand Style: Learning past photographic movements can inform present-day photographic approaches. San Francisco, California, 2010.

I’ve commented before on the value of planning and research before making photographs in the field, including spending time communing with books of or about photography. I thought it might be useful to share a few that I have found particularly useful or interesting.

• Vanishing Point by David Plowden. This is THE retrospective of the work of David Plowden, one of the last century’s foremost photographers of both rural and industrial America. Here is the culture of rivets, plows, and locomotives, the world of Grange halls, feed mills, and furnaces. The book is pure visual poetry, and a must for anyone who hopes to photograph industry, community, and built form.

• Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams. A thin volume and rather inexpensive, this book contains not Adam’s photography, but rather his words. In a series of essays, the well-known photographer discusses the role of beauty in making photographs, the difficulties of making critical images, and the challenge (and value!) of landscape and geography as a subject. Never stuffy, always readable.

• Approaching Nowhere by Jeff Brouws. This monograph contains some of Brouws’ recent work, most of which concentrates on the emptiness of the human-altered American landscape and the wanton decay of numerous communities.

• Silver Cities by Peter Bacon Hales. This book is one of the standards of photographic interpretation for urban photography in the United States. Re-issued a few years ago, it is heavy on text, although it does contain some photographs to help illustrate its points. Telling the story of American urban photography from the early Daguerrotypes through to 1939, the author lays out every major photographic movement, concentrating on styles, subject choices, and intentions. This book is an absolute must-have and must-read for anyone series about making photos of urban subjects.

This list is far from comprehensive, but each entrant spoke to me, my style, and my intentions. I encourage every photographer to make their own list, and towards that end, I welcome any suggestions others may have.

Among those who have an interest in the photography of railroads — or at least in making photographs that rise above the typical output of the railfan photography subculture — there has been a steady incessant griping about a lack of an outlet. Industry publications have only limited opportunities for photographers, and consumer publications often stick close to their railfan bases. It’s not that these publications don’t have an interest in more artistic forms of railroad photography, it is more that, among railroad photographers, they are sometimes perceived as more conservative in their tastes. A desire for a magazine or other publication aimed directly at the photographer’s market simmered. Last year, Carstens — publishers of Railfan, decided to take a risk and put out just such a publication: Great Railroad Photography, the first of a planned annual publication run.

GRP is, essentially, an all-features railfan magazine. Within its covers will be found no departments, no columns, no news articles. The entirety of the publication is dedicated to (primarily) full-color feature stories, eight in all. There are no columns or departments, save for an introduction by editor Steve Barry. A few random pages of advertisements at the beginning and the end of the volume remind you that this is a magazine (and not a slim book), but overall the real estate is given over to content, making the publication feel very upmarket. 

Yet I use the description “all features railfan magazine” with intent. The cover photo is a clear and crisp but not particularly groundbreaking front-on photo of a tourist steam locomotive. Inside, there are some real stand-out features, like Kevin Scanlon’s photo-essay on the steel mill landscapes of Pittsburgh, Steve Crise’s portrait of the Nevada Northern steam railroad, and Keith Burgess’ moody, expressionistic photos. But alongside these are other features — notably a spread on the Milwaukee Road by Karl Zimmerman and a story on the Clinchfield Railroad by Ron Flannary — that feel far less photography-oriented. I want to be very specific here: it is not that these stories are poor, but it is that they are centered more on a historical narrative and don’t feel like they belong in a magazine purporting to be about “great railroad photography.” They appeal on the basis of historical content, not their photography, and thus their presence strikes a discordant note in the publication. 

The pattern of each feature is somewhat uneven. While each holds to a similar layout of fairly large photos and very little text, sometimes one wonders why the text is there at all. This is especially true of articles like Elrond Lawrence’s piece on the Santa Fe Railway. It is as if the creators of GRP are not yet sure what this new photography-centered animal of a publication would be, and still in the hunt for a model, they’ve simply applied the traditional railfan photo-essay model and reduced the text ratio by about 2/3rds. Far better layouts are put forth for the Crise and Burgess pieces. Each is cleanly displayed, there are no errant or random snips of a larger text floated on unexpected plains of paper, and there’s a certain cohesive tightness to the design and layout. Both concentrate — properly — on letting the images speak for themselves, and don’t make the horrid mistake of stacking both lengthy captions and text content on the same pages. 

GRP is published on heavy, full-gloss stock. It is sensually luscious to hold. Color reproduction is top-notch, and I found no obvious flaws or color casts, although the black-and-white images in the Scanlon peice seem rather dark, and the images from the two vintage oriented features seem a bit washed out. 

The bottom line question to ask is, does Great Railroad Photography live up to its name, and to its own cover blurb, which states that it is “an exciting journey crossing boundaries of photographic style and expression?” My answer is: not yet. The 2010 issue contains among its pages a few strong pieces and some mostly elegant layouts, but it is still feeling its way around, still developing its voice and its philosophical bent. Despite these flaws, the production team that put together the magazine deserves a lot of credit. They are the first publishing house to attempt to fill the photography niche in a long time, and they’ve put together an ambitious first try. If Carstens does indeed make this an annual publication, I strongly suspect that Great Railroad Photography will mature into a substantial role as an outlet for artistic — or great, as it were — railroad photography.

Great Railroad Photography is available directly from the publisher.

Robert Adams is one of the few American photographers of note who also writes about the process of making photographs without becoming pedantic about it. He starts his essay on the photographing of evil with an example of a small colorado railroad town, a mining town. The example gives me pause: after all, I love the human-altered landscape. Evil? Sure, I understand why Adams disdains what mining has done to the Western landscape, but of all the things to start an essay on the photography of evil with, these seem like heavy, provocative words.

This is not to say that there isn’t negativity here, and one has to give credit to Adams: he is, after all, trying to build a case for a photographer making pictures of such negativity. In a medium that seems to have given itself over to populist romanticism — twilight vistas, coastal drama, the postcard or promotional or public-relations image — a bit of realism, a bit of negativity is a welcome thing.

For me, I cite negativity as one of the things that has attracted me back to making railroad images. The contemporary railroad has much about it that is regrettable. As part of a larger industrial rush towards ultimate efficiency, it has largely abandoned much of the rural West to decay. It asks employees to work farther and farther from home under far less stable conditions, as if unreasonable expectations become reasonable if the pay is high enough. The world of the railroad worker is increasingly isolated from society and from other employees, a place of inhospitable solitude which leaves little room for family much less friends.

While Adams was, I think, making a case for finding beauty in the negative, I would make the corollary case: that when a genre focuses too much on beauty alone, it loses some relevance to the world. Negativity is not something that one might strive to find beauty in, but rather is a necessary balance against the dangers of rampant romanticism. Negativity is needed, it grounds the photographer and the photographs.

On a related note, for anyone serious about photography, especially landscape photography and related sub-genres, I recommend securing copies of Adams’ Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph. Both books contain essays on photography that are highly readable yet also highly thoughtful. You will likely find yourself frequently agreeing with what Adams says about this medium, but also on occasion disagreeing heartily. At all times you learn. They’re both relatively cheap and both worth picking up.

Although the Northwest boasts three major metropolitan regions — Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland — it is the small town that most defines the character of the region. With sparse populations, vast agricultural regions, and a legacy of resource based economics, the town (and sometimes, failed town) dots the landscape with regularity. In the post-industrial world, many of these towns have replaced their old ways of life with tourism, and few now would ever remember that a place such as Seaside, Oregon, for example, was once a timber town instead of a taffy town. Yet for every milltown turned tourist trap, there’s a half dozen that remain truer to their heritages, and it is these more authentic and less famous towns of the Northwest that Foster Church has packed into his guidebook, Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest.

Church intends the book as a true guidebook, as with the dozens and dozens seen in the travel or regional sections of our area bookstores. Unlike many of these contemporaries, however, Church’s volume aims at something more akin to authenticity. Explicit in the beginning is the admonition to treat visiting small towns differently, as the author exhorts the virtues of visiting the local Chamber of Commerce, reading the local paper, and eating breakfast in the local diner as ways to learn the local culture. A requirement of any town he has included is the provision of lodging; Church argues that a town that seems at first sleepy and passed-by will reveal itself better to a traveller the next morning.

Following a brief introduction in which the author lays out these arguments, the book is divided into five chapters, each corresponding to a specific region of the Northwest: the Willamette Valley, the Oregon Coast, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Washington. The bulk of Washington and the entirety of Idaho are excluded from the book, much less other states (or provinces) that have traditionally been described as Northwestern. This is perhaps understandable given that Church was a staff writer at the Portland Oregonian for over twenty years and is likely most familiar with Oregon towns or towns within a short drive of Portland, but the lack is noticeable and unfortunate, at a minimum bringing the choice of title into question. Within each chapter is an entry on a small town. In railroad fashion, the town name is followed by its elevation. Next comes a brief paragraph describing the road to the town; perhaps reflecting the author’s interest in off-beat locations, all of the towns in the book are reachable only by road, although the presence of transit options is an unspoken likelihood. The bulk of the entry then consists of a short, generally narrative text describing a typical visit. The entry is then bookended by a single paragraph describing what Church terms “the basics” of lodging and dining. In all, 48 towns are covered. Following the entries is a brief epilogue and an index.

The author has walked a very fine line with this book. Although organized and promoted as a guidebook, Church gives us more a collection of small narratives, like a journalist encyclopedia of place. The writing is solid, verging on poetic at times with an occasional turn of phrase flashing through like agates on a sandy beach. Read as narrative, the book can almost be frustrating, as you want to read more, to learn more, and instead are given a short paragraph on where and how to visit and then rushed off to the next entry. There is something vaster here, something that Church should seriously consider, the potential for a book that is equal parts John Berendt and Stewart Holbrook. Yet, is this sense of “not quite enough” exactly the point? In some ways, by leaving the reader wanting more, the reader is also left wanting to fill in the missing pieces themselves by visiting. In that, we can almost forgive the missed opportunities of a straight prose work.

As a guidebook, however, the work is equally difficult to peg down. Church isn’t going for comprehensive, but instead for the ways of visiting towns that he views as most authentic to place. In Mount Angel, for example, the bulk of the entry involves the experience of staying at the Benedictine Abbey in town. There’s nothing wrong with this, except that it places the book more into the tradition of travel writing than of a guidebook. Further, there’s a deeper issue revolving around the author’s methodology of finding authentic rather than touristy small towns. His advice for knowing a small town partly relies on the same questionable mechanism as tourist towns do, like the visitor’s center. Other staples of local place that Church advocates are the local diner’s bulletin board or attending a local school sports function. There may have been a time when these suggestions would reveal a fully realized small town community, but if so it hasn’t been in this reviewer’s admittedly young life.

The book is a standard trade paperback guidebook, well executed and business-like with an attractive color cover. It feels fine to flip through, and will likely not begin to fall apart until many years past it becoming obsolete. With no photographs and only a few maps, there’s little to complain about.

Overall, Discovering Main Street is a solid book with interesting stories and useful information for the traveller seeking something other than the usual over-advertised tourist traps. Although not a fully realized guidebook nor a true work of prose, Foster Church’s writing is eloquent and occasionally beautiful in its own right, and the ways that he recommends visiting these towns are refreshing. The book will prove interesting to anyone who remembers the invaluable works of Thomas Friedman and is seeking a more contemporary offering.

Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest is available beginning this month from Powell’s, Amazon as well as directly from OSU Press.

In American culture, the railroad is often viewed as a collection of marvelous technical feats, of brutish powerful locomotives hurtling thousands of tons of freight at great speeds. Beyond this technical and technological aspect, however, the railroad has always been a place of people, a machine sure, but a machine run by human beings. Thanks to social and technological changes, however, the railroad worker of today is no longer seen or heard from on a daily basis. Instead, they exist inside a closed, wholesale-side world, one that runs 24/7/365 but largely out of view of the public consciousness. Linda Niemann, a former brakewoman on the Southern Pacific, seems more adept than any other contemporary writer at cracking open this insular, often nocturnal world to outsiders. In Railroad Noir, Niemanns’s third book, she again plunges readers into the realms of the railroad world through a series of short non-fiction narratives, accompanied by the moody, pensive imagery of photography Joel Jensen.

Following the acknowledgements is a brief introduction shared between the writer Niemann and the photographer Jensen, primarily discussing how the book came into being after many years working together on articles. The book then launches into the heart of the matter, 20 stories or life on the railroad by Niemann. The first ten are each accompanied by a single opening image from Jensen in black-and-white. Following this group comes a gallery of 21 color images and a map of the Southern Pacific system, Neimann’s former employer. The map, though handy, seems slightly incongruous slapped down here in Jensen’s photos, and would have made more sense at one end or the other of the book. Next come two short stories that begin with color images, and then seven more stories accompanied by black-and-white photographs. One chapter, “Lord of the Night,” is accompanied by a photograph of an apparently ancient drawing of a Native American god; it is unclear whose photograph this is as it is not accompanied by a location, does not fit Jensen’s usual style or subject matter, and is not included in the publisher’s official count of photos in the book. A glossary of railroad terms rounds out the work.

Railroad Noir is essentially an anthology of Niemann’s stories. Some of these were printed previously as parts of her first book, Boomer, or in the pages of TRAINS Magazine (where they were likewise accompanied by the photos of Joel Jensen). Niemann’s writing is intense and often poignant as she tells tales of the hidden underclass who populate the railroad. Her personal landscape is made up of dry, dingy built spaces, vast and terrifyingly beautiful desserts, and windblown openness. This is not the ordinary America we all see and experience, but a private, clannish world, a refuge for the people who, as Niemann puts it, are “on the borders” of life. She is brutally honest and raw with her descriptions of her co-workers lives, from drug addiction to sexual problems and alcoholism. Niemann is no finger-wagger, however, and spends considerable time examining her own life with all of its flaws and mistakes. Yet at no time does Niemann come off as moralizing. She presents this world not without a judgement for or against it, but instead with a kind of documentarian’s sensibility. The railroad world and its inhabitants, to Niemann, are a microcosm of humanity that has value and should be recorded and understood. Her writing is both open and slightly sentimental, which only adds to the complexity and confusion over what to think of this part of society.

The pairing of the text with Jensen’s photos is very complimentary, as Jensen has a gritty loner’s eye that immediately makes the viewer feel like both an insider and an outcast. Images like “Mechanics on break” on page 62 or “Truck stop” on page 110 speak loudly of the isolation of this world view. More poignant, however, are the two images of railroad workers walking in the snow towards their motels, “Off duty” on page 70 and “Home away from home” on page 71. Both have an eerie, unearthly glow to them from a world lit only by off-color, man-made light. Beyond these pools of glow, in the blackness, there is, perhaps, another world out there sleeping, but if so it is one which the denizens of the railroad have no part or place in.

The format of the book is much like a photography book, not a book of text, and as a result it sometimes feels that there are not enough photos from Jensen. Beyond that, the book could also have benefitted from more images to help a fresh reader develop a better understanding of the tone of the world that Niemann is describing. As far as the text, Niemann continues to give us compellingly written stories of her time on the railroad. Occasionally, however, she delves into unusual side-jaunts away from the railroad — one such jaunt takes us with her to Mexico where she learns Spanish by immersion. It is only after a few of these narrative sidebars occur that the reasoning becomes clear: this is not a topical book about life on the railroad, but rather a memoir of someone who worked for and lived in the railroad world. In some ways, this limits the book, as an audience seeking a more topical focus might find these side-jaunts to be distracting. As a method of carrying forward a sense of authenticity, however, the decision to include these extra-railroad memories is quite effective. The title, however, remains deceptive: “Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century” does not very well convey that the book is, in fact, a highly personal biographical narrative. These are minor quibbles, however, and both the narrative and the images chosen are all top-notch work.

Fit and finish shows the book itself is a quality product. Photo reproduction looks to be good, and color is consistent and fresh. No image is spread across two pages, a stylistic choice that retains the power of most of the photos but at the price of displaying them rather small. The paper is solid and thick and should hold up well, but it also has an odd, rubbery feel to the fingers. The size of the book is moderate — its horizontal frame will fit on a standard shelf — but there are some odd quirks resulting from this format choice. Although this is basically a book of stories accompanied by some photographs, this size makes it inconvenient to take as a piece of travel reading. It is also not ideal to read in your lap in an armchair, or in bed. Despite the fact that it is a fairly small coffee-table book, a coffee-table book it remains, and it feels best to read it at a table. This is not exactly the most comfortable place to spend time getting lost in Niemann’s compellingly penned world.

Overall, Railroad Noir is an interesting book with some sophisticated photos and a moving set of narratives. Photographers may find the book a good addition to their collection, but this is not primarily a photography book and it is certainly not a pictorial aimed at a typical railfan market. The book should prove interesting to those with an interest the human and social sides of railroading as well as those who enjoy railroad literature. .

Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century is available from Amazon, Powell’s Books, as well as directly from the publisher.

Classic Steam: Timeless Photographs of North American Steam Railroading

By John Gruber. Forward by William L. Withun. Fall River Press, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016; http://www.sterlingpublishing.com/imprints?imprint=Fall+River+Press; 12.25 x 12.8 in; hardbound; 224 pages, 43 color and 248 b/w photos, $19.98

The steam era of railroading in North America remains one of the most evocative subjects in transportation history. The period has become a romanticized, almost stereotyped part of the American narrative, part-and-parcel of our national myth along side Paul Revere, wagon trains on the Oregon Trail, and the storied two-lane blacktop of Route 66. Even to those far too young to have witnessed the steam era, the iconography of the word “train” remains the cartoon-like image of a steam locomotive, huffing and chuffing, belching steam, smoke, and cinders. In Classic Steam: Timeless Photographs of North American Steam Railroading, author John Gruber attempts to take us on a photographic trip back to that era.

The book opens with a forward by William L. Withuhn, a curator at the Smithsonian and author of a previous work along similar themes, the volume Spirit of Steam from the mid 1990s. As Withuhn notes, Classic Steam is meant to be a follow-on to that volume. The forward text — like all subsequent texts throughout this rather hefty volume — is short, and frames the work as a collection of photographs of the late steam era in the United States.

Following the forward, Gruber presents us with a three page introduction, by far the longest stretch of text in the entire work. Much of the text discusses the steam locomotive itself, rather than railroading in the steam era in a general sense. Although Gruber does briefly — and perhaps presciently — mention the influence of photographers Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg on the cultural image of the steam era railroad, this text is primarily a short nostalgic romp, even going so far as to rope in a mention of Lionel toy trains and the author’s grandson.

Next come eight chapters, each containing a multitude of photographs. Each chapter is themed: shortlines, narrow gauge, local passenger trains, luxury named trains, mainline railroads, people, stations, and steam in preservation today. These themes are not always immediately evident, however, as some chapter titles carry quotes such as “Connections to…” and no explanatory deck. Following the title is a short text — about 200 words or less on average — that provides a bit more explanation, but little in the way of additional detail. After this brief interlude of text — opposite a full page image — we launch into the meat of the chapter, consisting of primarily black-and-white images. Although some images are shown at less than a quarter page, most are bigger, and many are shown either full page (and full bleed) or double truck.

Also interspersed within each chapter are what could best be described as mini features, each relating to the chapter’s theme. These usually consist of 2-3 images across a two-page spread, accompanied by a text of some sort, usually about the action caught within the images themselves. Following the last chapter is an index, a brief listing of biographies for some of the photographers of the book, and some other housekeeping material.

Having almost no interpretive text, this book is dedicated to the images themselves. Gruber has chosen to give us a rich range of photographers, including the likes of J. Parker Lamb, Richard Steinheimer, David Plowden, Jim Shaughnessy, and Phil Hastings. He also gives us outsiders like Farm Services Administration (FSA) photographers Gordon Parks and Jack Delano. (A number of the latter’s precious color images adorn the book.) We also get work from less well known photographers such as Frank Barry, James P. Gallagher, and John Shaw, and a number of others. Finally, the author includes a number of his own images. Each photograph in the work is accompanied by insightful, sometimes lengthy captions.

A number of images stick out as notable. One of the finer conventional scenes is that on page 29, a photograph of a small Texas shortline by Fred Springer. A small, generic looking steam locomotive approaches across a blank, rolling grassland, belching out a plume of smoke with the depth of black usually associated with burning tires. To the left and far away are some low scrubby ridges, and to the right there is only a boney old pole line, receding into the lonestar distance. There is a vast emptiness here that is timeless. On page 40, we have a view from a similar region, this time Colorado and a scrappy narrow gauge line from that state. The photographer, Barclay Robsinson, has shot from the roof top of some of the train’s boxcars, looking up towards the head end and against the sun. Two plumes of dense black exhaust pile skyward, one from the lead engine, and one from a helper tucked in mid-train. It is not just a photograph of a train, it is a classic photograph of the mythic West. Looking at this image, one almost expects to see Wyatt Earp riding down the dreaded red-sashed cowboys on the flanks of the distant rolling hills.

More precious, perhaps, are some of the human interest photographs. An image on page 102 from the Arthur Dubin collection at Lake Forest College shows a worker at Chicago Union Station in 1938, adjusting a new electric sign for the Pennsylvania Railroad. There is only the monolithic sign with its promises of escape, and the face of the worker awash in its reflected glow. What is there, beyond the darkness, between the worker and the sign? The picture is sharp and precise, and the years between the viewer and the viewed fall away into the shadows. Another image of labor and the steam era is found on page 153, in a photograph of a young hostler in Winnepeg, Manitoba helping to refuel a locomotive with coal. Taken by FSA veteran Gordon Parks, the hostler is fresh faced and caught mid-work, with no artifice or pose, his hair tossed in the breeze and his feet lost in the swirl of blurry coal dust. The photograph does display some odd yellow haze, as if it had once been toned, but despite the flaws it remains fresh, almost cinematic.

The last two images I will mention are both panoramas, but very different ones and from different eras. The first is a photograph by Esther Bubley of the New York Central’s yards at Weehawken, New Jersey, found on page 174. Apparently taken in the 1930s, the photo shows a busy, gritty yard beside the Hudson River as a short train departs below the highly-set camera. Taking up the upper quarter of the image, beyond the river, is the classic skyline of Manhattan, triumphantly centered on the ghostly presence of the Empire State Building. Few images so well capture the era of American industrial progress. Just looking at it gives one the urge to break out the Monopoly game board. Displaying an equally breathtaking but completely opposite scene is Joel Jensen’s black-and-white panorama of a Union Pacific steam special, found spread across pages 210 and 211. Pushed far down to the bottom of the frame is the train — the entire length of it, from it twin steam locomotives at the head end to the observation car at the rear. Hovering over the train is a sweep of exhaust, and above it all is a sky that is vast, tumultuous, and heavy with portents of rain and change.

Classic Steam puzzled me from the first glance. This is a thick volume — it is over 200 pages after all, and weighs a total of five pounds. It is, in short, a tank, with a massive amount of content stuffed into it. Between the sheer number of images and (at first) unclear organizational method, it seems to lack focus. Upon cracking it open for the first time, one wonders, is it a book on locomotives? The forward suggests not, the introduction doesn’t really clue us in either way, and the first chapter with its nebulous title is primarily a collection of locomotive pictures. While the book is more than locomotive-centric, this makes for a misleading start. Even after grasping the organizational idea, there’s still the feeling that there’s just too much there. The book would benefit from tighter organization, or less overall content, or best of all more text to provide a narrative upon which to hang this large collection of images.

It is only after considering the broad range of photographic talent within the volume that the book begins to make some sense. Classic Steam is not a comprehensive illustrated history, nor a book about the photography of steam era railroading. Instead, it is a general pictorial, in every way the spiritual successor to the many works of Beebe and Clegg, mentioned by Gruber in his introduction and included among the ranks of the photographers in the book. Like this duo, Gruber includes a wide selection of the best photographers, has a ranging taste in subjects, and happily includes his own (thoroughly deserving) photographs along side those of his contributors.

Regarding quality and finish, this is a mass market book, produced for sale at Barnes & Noble, and as such there are a number of compromises that have been made to bring the price down. Most notably, the cover stock is printed paper over board, much like a college text book. This likely will not hold up as well long-term as a cloth covered binding. The book does come with a dust jacket, printed with the same colorful design as the cover, but in true B&N fashion it will likely have a large price sticker slapped on the front, as mine did. Overall, the size of the book is massive, to the point that it feels almost too large for holding in ones lap; this truly is a coffee table book. Fortunately, the spine does allow the book to lay fairly flat, and the double-truck images thus are displayed fully and excellently.

Image reproduction is acceptable, but there are many cases where the darks of an image have become somewhat blocky and dense. Having printed black-and-white before and seen many prints in person, I suspect that there were subtle midtones and darks that were lost in the printing. That said, this is a generalist book and it is unlikely that the audience it is intended for will notice this. There are a couple of odd choices, however. Although the quality of images chosen is generally high, a few images were sourced from prints that appear to have been made in rather dusty darkrooms that were not equipped with spotting brushes. (This can perhaps be forgiven, however, considering the rarity and likely lack of negatives for some of these images.) Worse, though, is the leading image of chapter eight, a shot of an East Broad Top locomotive wreathed in steam. The color image blatantly displays heavy pixelization, as if the image were a low quality JPEG from the Internet that had only been used by mistake.

Overall, Classic Steam is one of the more comprehensive photographic anthologies of steam era railroading produced in the last half century. Unlike many consumer oriented generalist books, Gruber has assembled an “all-star” cast of photographers and content. Although the book has some flaws — mostly due to a lack of enough text “backbone” — it is a huge endeavor and when the price is considered it becomes likely the best book deal in a long long time. Although the book frustratingly lacks much in the way of an interpretive history, a photographer may find this to be the greatest bargain way of sampling some of the most meaningful railroad photographers of the mid 20th Century. In addition, those with a general interest in railroad history or those seeking a gift for a young person with a budding interest in railroads would be well advised to pick up a copy. In some ways, this successor to the tradition of Beebe and Clegg is just that, a gift to the author’s young grandson and an attempt to convey to that generation a precious experience before all traces of its memory are lost.

Classic Steam: Timeless Photographs of North American Steam Railroading is available from Barnes & Noble.

Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art
Photographs by Jim Lommasson. Introduction by Inara Verzemnieks. Afterword by Prudence Roberts. Oregon State University Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331; http://oregonstate.edu/; 12.5 x 10.5 in; hardbound; 48 pages, 30 color and 9 b/w photos; $25.00

The transitory nature of art has always been fascinating. Photographs can fade, negatives can stiffen and crack and slides can succumb to color shifts and mildew. Sculptures fair little better; it has been suggested that the features on the statues of St. Mark’s Square in Venice have softened over the years, eroding away from acidic rainfall. And paintings? Even in the care of the greatest museums, many of the masters of the Renaissance onwards have developed crackled surfaces. The resulting revealed lower layers of paint are known as pentimento, but they are not confined to great canvases in the museum halls of Europe. In Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art, photographer Jim Lommasson explores an example of this effect on a Portland landmark, the carousel at the Oaks Park amusement park. The results, far from trivial, create a fascinating juxtaposition of Edwardian and Mid-Century cultures, as well as provide a unique encapsulation of the temporal nature of the arts.

Lommasson’s book is almost the result of an accident. During an assignment from a photography class in 1970, the photographer noted that the paintings on the central pillar of the carousel at the Oaks were peeling away, the victim of age, exposure to elements, and occasional flood waters. Lommasson only shot a single frame in black-and-white, but he returned to the Oaks over a decade later and recorded all the central panels, this time in color. It was a prescient decision: a few short years later, the panels were “restored” to their scenes of northwest scenery by a local painting club, covering over the Edwardian imagery that had been bleeding through in the pentimento.

The slim volume opens up with an introduction by journalist Inara Verzemnieks, who writes lyrically about the nature of time and art. She describes the roots of the park as a competitor to the Lewis & Clark Exposition of 1905, a place of excitement and perhaps moral danger, where young women would cozy up to young men in the darkness and be frowned upon by the local clergy for so doing. The original paintings on the carousel mimic this somewhat naive sense of adventure, with Arabian sheiks on camels, befeathered Indian chiefs, and beautiful women exhibiting a range of behaviors from stately and elegant (strolling under a parasol) to scandalous (can-can- dancing). By the 1940s, such images were dated and old fashioned, and the park had them covered over with scenic vistas of the Columbia Gorge and other northwest scenes, all far more family friendly and far more in keeping with the highway-centric provincial boosterism notions of the era. Yet, as the surface images degraded, they began to merge with the lower layers, almost as if they were interacting with each other, a process that Verzemnieks relates in a haunting way.

Following the excellent introduction, Lommasson provides a short text describing how and why he shot the images of the carousel’s central riding panels, and then come the 18 large color plates. The most striking image is perhaps that of the woman with a parasol, with the Columbia Gorge Highway circling about her legs leading to the Vista House located rather provocatively between her thighs. It is such a strange image, almost like an intentional double-exposure on film, and yet, there was no artist for these images. Yes, there were the artists who painted the original panel of the woman, and also two later artists — the eccentric Chase brothers — who painted the scene of the highway and river. But who painted this image, this amalgamation? Time, nature, God? No human hand with intent created this image. For that matter, is the art in question here the painted panels themselves, or Lommasson’s photographs? Who is the artist, and what is the art? The lines all blur here in ways that are similar to graffiti art. Everything about the panels is provocative.

The book wraps up with an afterword by art historian Prudence Roberts. Roberts tells the story of the panels, from their creation by anonymous immigrant artistis at the carousel factor in 1912 to their repainting by off-beat brothers Waldo Spore and William Corbin Chase. The Chases were painters and wood-block printers, part of the larger arts-and-crafts movement. They were also highly unconventional, living for a time in a teepee in the woods of Western Washington State. The text is accompanied by images of the park and works of the talented Chase brothers.

Overall, the book succeeds in placing the carousel panels in a much larger context of art and regional culture. The texts are rich, and the images largely thought provoking. If I had any critical comments, it would be that there is not enough. I would have welcomed more information on the chases, as well as on the original anonymous painters who created the Edwardian imagery. Then again, in the words of circus promoter P. T. Barnum, who would no doubt have felt at home at a place like the Oaks, “always leave them wanting more.”

The book is the typically shelf-awkward size that photography and art books assume, and it also feels rather slim. This makes it seem, at first glance, a bit pricey for its size. Although time spent pouring over the work ought to dismiss those concerns, it does remain slim enough that it just doesn’t feel good to hold in your lap and flip through. I always felt like the book was awkward and wanting to slip from my hands or lose its dust jacket. It is far easier to view set on a table top, and while that’s probably the recommended way to view any book of art or photography, I really like to relax in a nice chair with my books, and with Pentimento you just can’t do that. The images themselves are all crisp and the entire book is printed on a thick, high quality paper with a satin sheen to it.

Pentimento is a volume that explores history, artistic philosophy, and Pacific Northwest culture through a unique lens. It is far more than a book about an amusement park ride. It should prove valuable to those interested in the esoterica of Portland history, as well as those with a passion for documentary photography and painting in general.

Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art is available from Powell’s Books, Amazon, and directly from the publisher.