Photo: Joel Jensen

Here is the official presentation description from the forthcoming AHC newsletter:

Railroad Architecture and the Northwest:
Economics, Ethos, and Culture

Saturday, February 18, 2012
10:00 am-11:30 am
Members: $10
General public: $18

Railroads were one of the driving forces in the settlement and urbanization of the United States. Through their station buildings, they left a profound architectural legacy on the country. From humble wooden depots that pioneered the concept of franchise architecture through to grand urban depots displaying the power of the country’s new “millionaire society,” these structures embody the story of America’s Gilded Age. Portland and the Pacific Northwest region include a number of fine examples of these structures, and collectively contribute to the understanding of our region’s past.

Alexander B. Craghead will share his approach to railroad architecture as cultural history. Alex is a Portland-based writer and photographer whose work has most recently appeared in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin and Trains Magazine. You will learn about the restoration work of two of the region’s grand urban stations with ties to important works of Italian architecture, as well as the miraculous, eleventh hour rescue of the oldest depot in Oregon. Culminating the presentation is a unique look at the history of Portland’s landmark Union Station of 1896. The presentation is supported by numerous photographs and illustrations, including the depot photographs of award winning photographer Joel Jensen.

Pre-registration is strongly suggested — visit us online at www.VisitAHC.org.

All ticket funds go towards supporting the mission of the AHC to support and preserve the architectural heritage of the Portland area. I’m excited to have this chance to dig into the region’s rail architecture, and I’m including in the program some fun surprises. Hope to see you there!

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.

Mad Men ´The Carousel´ from Emilio on Vimeo.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the purpose of photography, and how it might be shared with others. One of the ideas I just lightly skimmed on was the issue of permanence in photography, a quality that seems, to me, to be somewhat conflicted. 

On one hand, photography is a vital part of documentary. It serves a role in making permanent records. After all, how many of us have our memories of past times preserved through photos? From the Facebook photo album to the 1960s reel of Kodachromes that your parents made on their vacations, photographs have held a traditional role of preserving family history. Likewise, for historians, photographs have provided a vital record of past times, from the natural and built environment to labor practices to cultural norms. Examples of the latter range from landscape photographers like William Henry Jackson and urbanists like Paris’ Atget through to social reformers like Jacob Riis and FSA documentarians Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others. 

At the same time, photographs are highly temporary. The most common popular outlets of photography were — and still primarily remain — newspapers and magazines. Both are publications that are produced frequently and have an implied shelf-life — many magazines even state on their covers the date when they ought to cease to be displayed. Both publications are frequently recycled after a very short duration of existence. Neither format is constructed robustly, as their temporal nature is an accepted part of their formats. Outside of media, prints are often lost, and film negatives often become aged, distorted, and un-useable. Digital images, in theory, are safer from degradation, but there’s some question of what will become of the massive number of digital images photographers — be they the family snap-shooter or the most seasoned professional — over time.

According to the old saw, a picture is worth a thousand words, but as precious as that makes them, they may not last nearly as long. I’m unsure where this leads, except that it reinforces one strong personal and artistic belief: that the photographs we create must have some relevant role now. As precious as documentation is, photography’s best defense is not preservation, but rather in how it can directly affect those who are exposed to it. The purpose may be humble — to record a favorite moment for example — or it may be a part of a grand attempt to alter the viewpoint of society. Or it might be somewhere in between. Regardless, it is purpose that ought to be at the forefront of each and every photographer’s mind — including my own. 

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.

I’ve always felt that time and loss are integral to community. It is the passage of time and the changes — losses — that time brings that makes a sense of place more palpable. To be in a place one has never been before carries a kind of excitement and wonder, but to return to a place — especially after the passage of time — is an entirely different sort of sensation. The tart edge of freshness is worn away, and deeper, nuanced subtleties become more visible. Partly this is because of the thoughts, feelings, and ripening of memories that takes place between the first visit and the next, but much of it, too, is created through the changes wrought by time.

When I think of time, change, and photography, there’s one artist who comes to mind above all else: David Plowden. I recently wrote about Plowden’s railroad photography for the Railfan and Railroad “Extra Board.” Plowden is widely known for his being “one step ahead of the wrecking ball” as he photographs the fading remnants of Industrial Age America. The latest installment of this visual obsession is the book Requiem for Steam, which is now available in local bookstores.

Recently, Plowden went on Iowa Public Radio to talk about steam locomotives, photography, and this latest book. The interview is 49 minutes long, but well worth making time to listen to. It made for a good start to this Monday with my morning tea. Plowden has a mesmerizing voice and a lively edge to his words; you can tell them man is truly passionate about what he photographs.

Plowden had no intention of being a photographer: he wanted to be “a railroad man.” When he went to university, he studied economics with the hope of becoming a railroad executive. “This was a terrible mistake,” he notes, “it really wasn’t the business end of railroading that interested me, it was the romance.” This was, in some ways, the “never-meet-your-heros” moment for Plowden, and his career in the railroad industry was short. Working for the Great Northern in Willmar, Minnesota, he ended up being promoted away from the locomotives and into the offices; shortly afterwards he quit.

This decision has a lot of resonance with me. I’ve had my Willmar moment as well, and learned very rapidly that I had little interest in the sterile, insular, acerbic environment that is the modern railroad. (That Plowden emerged with his longing for the romance of railroading intact is a small miracle.) Photographers, I think, have a hard time relating to the world as a functioning part of it. We feel more comfortable behind the camera, observing, recording, judging, praising, condemning, hoping. Or am I alone in feeling that way?

I could go on relating Plowden’s early photographic career chasing the last pulse-beats of the steam railroad, or his self-described “brazenness” that made it possible, but I’d be ruining the interview for you. Listen to it, even if you aren’t interested in steam locomotives. Learn from it how this photographer thinks about the images he makes, and how to approach subjects, and having purpose in ones photography.

And for those who can swing a bit of travel this week, Plowden will be in Sacramento for two events, the first a fundraiser for the Center for Railroad Photography and Art on Thursday night, and the second being a book-signing event on Saturday. Both will be at the California State Railroad Museum. I’ll be attending both events, and I encourage anyone else who can to do the same.

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.

What makes up the cultural DNA of Portland? This is a question that, as a student of cities, I constantly ask myself. It is the reason I have travelled to other cities in the region, spanning from Vancouver, B.C. to San Francisco. It is the reason I have a passion for history, a passion for photography, a passion for local food. All of these things help me to form perspective on what makes this place, this urban region, so unique.

A number of weeks ago, friend and fellow Portland blogger Dan Haneckow lead a history tour around his neighborhood, the Overlook area of Portland. Taking place on a fine, sunny, but breezy afternoon, the walk attracted around fifty people of all ages and backgrounds. Dan lead us through the streets north of the old town of Albina, as far east as Interstate 5, and as far north as Killingsworth. Along the way we learned about the filling of ravines, secret basement speakeasy bars, Polish enclaves, victims of the Japanese internment, and all sorts of other historic scraps.

At about 7 p.m., the tour wound down, and about eight of us stuck around (Dan and myself included) to have dinner and a beer at the Lucky Lab and talk history. A gaze around the table was fascinating. Old mixed with young, newcomers mixed with natives, blue collar mixed with white. And what was this diverse crowd doing over beers, in the blue-hour light, on a random Summer sunday evening?

We were discussing where, of all things, the Piggly Wiggly used to be.

Of all the things, this strange mix of backgrounds, ages, occupations, and origins all had one thing in common, and that was an intense interest — perhaps love — of place. By place I don’t mean the grandness of the bridge-hemmed river, the cast iron Gilded Age remnants of Old Town, or the postcard-stock rose gardens and parks. I mean instead the most intimate levels of location. Building by building, block by block, the finest grain of urbanity. These were people who cared who owned the house before them as well as who came before them, and before them, and so on back to the builders. These were people who wanted to know just what used to be in the coffee shop, just why the building on the corner is rounded, just why there’s a tall, odd, green metal pole that stands orphan beside the road.

This love of place is a kind of historic hyper-localism, or as Lost Oregon’s John Chilson recently described it to me, “micro-history.” I hesitate to say whether this trait is unique to Portland, but there is no question to me that this sensitivity to the most intimate levels of historical narrative is a definite part of the Portland DNA, a common element of culture that crosses generational, economic, and social lines.

Naturally, in filling in the answers about the Portland DNA, I unearth yet more questions. Is this hyper-local historicism something that only reveals itself to a person after living in a place for a certain amount of time? Is it accessible only to the native or the local, of importance and available not to the visitor? And, therefore, is it rampant everywhere, but simply unavailable to me without living in those other places? Or, conversely, is it a unique quality or character of being of or from this region that we call Portland? Do we, here, breed and mold a culture of historicism? There has, after all, always been a reflective, contemplative, and inward turning tendency here. Maybe, just maybe, we’re all just a little geeky for what came before. Not a surprise, perhaps, for the city that reintroduced the world to the streetcar.

Recently, over at civics21.org, I wrote about the idea of hyperlocalism and history, or as local history blogger John Chilson described it to me, “microhistory.” This concept encompasses the bits and pieces of the past — the loose strings about the edges — that don’t often get encapsulated in the history books.

This intense and intimate scale interest in place — both in the traces of the past as well as the fingers of the present — is one of the aspects of photography that I am strongly drawn to. For me, photography really is a way to visually explore place, and the more tacticle the better.

The monuments, the vistas, the grand spaces, these have all been documented or interpreted countless times. As beautiful as the slopes of Mount Hood are, what more can I really add to the visual interpretations of that space, what can I contribute that has not already been said better? And no such photograph made by me will ever be able to transmit the holy beauty of that monolith.

However, in the common scramble of photographers to capture the big, the famous, the looming, the grand, we often have forgotten the corners of the world, the places that we pass by day-by-day, and which have so much story to tell if only we choose to listen.

Although such corners have always held a fascination for me, until discussin the idea of microhistory with John I had not really recognized that that was one of the threads to be found within my own visual work. Realizing this thread, however, has given me many new ideas to consider.

As a photographer, it always pays to be thinking about your photographs, even when you don’t have a camera about, and it pays too to talk to the people who know your subject matter, jsut as I did with John. It opens up your mind to new possibilities.

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.