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!

“Best” is, of course, a rather loose term. In some cases, these are images that are emblematic or reflective of the directions my photography took over the course of the year. In other cases, they are images that simply appealed to me on some more personal level. I’m hardly an objective or unbiased observer, so forgive my skewed and imperfect list.

As with previous 10 bests (see 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010,) the order is chronological, and clicking on the image will yield the image’s Flickr page.

1.

Sunset, Astoria

The setting sun reflects in the mud flats of Astoria, as the Winter tide slowly rolls in from the mouth of the Columbia River. Much of the town’s industry once sat perched over the mud on piers like these, but the ever changing economy has removed most of the docks and warehouses that once perched upon them. In some places, old boilers still stand, remnants of forgotten canneries.

Today, Astoria’s waterfront has far more tourism along it. A large resort hotel has moved in on one pier, and restaurants overhang the water along others. The old rail line now serves as a seasonal trolley route, and a new dock serves visits from numerous cruise ships each year. Yet in spite of this, there is still a pleasant blue-collar atmosphere to the port as well as the city. Cruise passengers reportedly enjoy seeing the large piles of export logs, noting that they feel they are in a real working seaport town instead of just another tourist trap. And unlike almost all of the ocean-side cities of Oregon and Washington, Astoria has a healthy balance of basic economy that keeps it from feeling like a giant, low-rent carnival.

This photograph was made on New Year’s Day, on a brief weekend visit to my favorite coastal town.

2.

First Run

TriMet 1702, one of two RDCs refurbished for use on the Westside Express Service commuter rail line, at Wilsonville on January 24, 2011, its first day of revenue service. Portland & Western Engineer Ken Nichols leans out of the window for a classic engineer’s pose.

WES is practically in my backyard, a commuter rail service that links outlying Wilsonville with inner suburbs like Tigard and Beaverton. Unfortunately the system was troubled by new equipment that proved to be unreliable at first, and TriMet bought the RDCs — stainless teel self-propelled cars built in the 1950s — as backup power. They are nice in their own way, with a vintage feel inside, though they don’t have the heating and air conditioning power of the newer vehicles, nor their free on board WiFi Internet access.

3.

Gateway to Central Oregon

Here, just outside of Madras, the importance of railroads to small towns was driven home. 100 years to the day, the citizens of Madras celebrate, through a re-enactment, the arrival of the Oregon Trunk Railroad in their town. This event cannot be overstated. Prior to the OT, Madras was a tiny village in an area of ORegon that was largely inaccessible by any modern means, an area the size of Massachusetts. The OT brought the upper Deschuttes River country into the modern world.

After the event, in the cold snows of February, the entire town was invited to visit the depot at Metolius, also celebrating its centennial, and enjoy a community meal. Barbecue, carrot cake, corn, and memories, all served in the freight section of an old railroad station. Oregon at its finest.

4.

Kent, Oregon

Kent is one of a number of towns along US 97 in Central Oregon, north of Madras. Being located on a two lane highway, students of geography would assume that towns such as Kent would have blossomed during the 20th Century. Perhaps they did once, but if so, there is little evidence to show it now. Towns such as Shaniko, Kent, and to a lesser extent Grass Valley and Moro have slowly withered. The Columbia Southern Railroad came here first, but it was always a branch that stubbed at lonely Shaniko; a through route bypassed the branch before the Second World War, and the branch came up in segments, the last remnant gone by the 1960s.

Today, the towns live on as clusters of homes and forsaken, abandoned commercial shacks that huddle at the feet of grain elevators. This pair at Kent is particularly evocative. At the back is a large set of concrete silos, probably dating to mid-century, and now equipped with a brand new digital truck scale. In the foreground is a tall, classic, wooden structure, but built in an interesting form, with big fat boards set flat and interwoven at the corners, like brickwork. Despite its total lack of paint, it seems strong and sturdy, with no outward signs of rot, and has likely been in continuous use for a century. Both structures align to the now gone Columbia Southern, and both hang on as part of the see-sawing grain economy of the region.

Highway or no, Kent, along with the other towns of Sherman County, feels as lonely as any spot I have ever visited in the Northwest. There are mysteries here — a graveyard solely occupied by children, all dead within ten years of each other, lurks to the south of town. There is a sense of isolated, inward lives, of forgotten despair, of dreams unrealized. Perhaps above all else is the stark beauty of the land, the vistas that roll ever onward, and the feeling that the region is far bigger than the mossy, dank, dripping fir tree stereotype that, even in the cities of Western Oregon and Washington, seems so pervasive despite its inaccuracy.

5.

Tacoma’s Pantheon

2011 saw the centennial of one of the more interesting and also forgotten pieces of architecture in the Northwest, Tacoma Union Station. The building was designed by Reed & Stem, the same firm that gave the world New York’s Grand Central Terminal. For Tacoma, they designed a homage to Rome’s Pantheon, a grand dome standing about 90 feet above the lobby floor, and roofed in with copper. Although not the largest such facility in the region, it was one of the more efficiently designed, and certainly it holds a grandeur that belies its modest footprint. It is no lightweight: its walls are a good fourteen feet thick in places!

Sadly, much like rail passenger service in general, the station declined through the second half of the last century. By the 1980s it was in such bad shape that Amtrak moved out to a new, boring, modern facility further from the center of town, and the building was roped off as unsafe. Intrepid local volunteers, however, rallied support, and after much hard work, restoration of the building was funded. The structure reopened in full glory in 1992, converted to a federal court house.

Here, under the oculus of the dome, hangs another piece of artwork from Tacoma, a chandelier designed by local glass artist Dale Chihuly. Chihuly’s glass adorns many parts of the old station, but this central hanging, which resembles a collection of oddities pulled from the sea, is probably the most spectacular. Though vastly different from the mixture of neoclassical and Beaux Arts style of the structure, somehow these sleek forms seem at home here.

Sadly the conversion means the station is no longer a station, which in some ways is a shame; of all the station buildings along the I-5 corridor, none are as impressive or inspiring as this. Yet the structure survives, and its second use guarantees it a long life ahead.

My thanks to the Government Services Administration to allowing access to photograph this structure.

6.

Skylines, Portland: I

The skyline photograph is perhaps one of the oldest forms of urban photography. The form could be considered the portrait applied to the city. We all know them. Anyone who ever watches the local news can see them in various forms of quality (or lack thereof) behind the news-anchors. They get used on billboards, in tourist promotions, as web site banners.

This is not, however, the typical Portland skyline. Usually they are shot from near the foot of the Hawthorne Bridge, showing that span and the KOIN tower and the Wells Fargo tower. This view, centered on the US Bancorp Tower, is not usually chosen, but it’s hard to understand the reason why. The city here looks far more impressive, and shot as it is at an oblique angle, the towers are shown to far more advantage. The Hawthorne view is more a side view, and can sometimes seem to be two-dimentional, giving no feel of scope to the city.

There are other, better viewpoints to the city out there, I think. Some still need exploration, but I suspect a view from further north will yield a truer vista of the city as it is now, which, with the South Waterfront and the Pearl, is far, far more urban than it was just a decade ago.

The funny thing is, of course, that nearly every city can be made to look this glittering and glamorous with a skyline photo — is it really true, though? Like a hilltop vista, there is enough distance between the camera lens and the dirty, scroungy, everyday level of life that the flaws seem to disappear. In this view of Portland, you can’t see the crack addicts freezing on the streets of old town, the mentally ill homeless, the immature bar brawls, the catcalls of college frats visiting the city for a wild friday night on the town. Everything looks sweeping, gilded, luscious. It’s the visual equivalent of one of my favorite pieces of syrupy 1960s jazz, Oscar Peterson’s take on “Wandering”.

How real is real? Is the dirty, scroungy, cigarette-butt-littered street view the real Portland? Or perhaps, for all my critical comments, is there also something just as real about idealized views like these? Is there not room for a picture of aspiration? Skylines, after all, are part nostalgia — the myth of who we were or are — and part aspiration, the myth of what we wish we were and wish to be.

7.

Medford, Oregon

We’re a long way from the economy of a century ago. Small factories rarely remain in use, and warehouses hav grown larger and larger and are usually located out by the freeways and served by big rig trucks. In the centers of the small towns that once were the commercial hubs of rural Oregon, the industrial districts, like this one in Medford, are mostly quiet places. The mainline of the railroad makes a bee-line through town, and few spurs now split from it to serve the buildings backing up to the steel road.

8.

Sacramento River High Bridge, Redding

Bridges are rarely boring, but rarely are bridges in the agricultural valleys of the Pacific Slope so impressive as this one. Here at Redding, California, the Sacramento River is far below the valley floor, almost in a coulee. To cross it, the Southern Pacific Railroad constructed a massive curved steel trestle, only part of which can be seen here. The trees are bare, the Winter sun is shining, and a manifest freight charges northwards towards Oregon.

9.

For the Love of Cars / Ground Zero of Parkinglotopia, Portland, Ore.

Portland is a postcard city. Much like Vancouver, B.C., it has become an example of urban planning and design for other metropolises across North America. Photographs of our light rail trains, our streetcars, our food carts, our restaurants, our waterfront, our public spaces, our farmers markets, our condominiums, etcetera etcetera etcetera abound.

But there are two sides to every postcard, and this is one of them. Despite our alleged respect for historic structures, we have always been at the bleeding edge of poor decision making, such as tearing down bits of our urban fabric to shove in parking lots. This one was ground zero, “built” (if one can actually “build” a lot) in the 1930s at the expense of a handsome office and commercial building. It is poetic irony that the billboard painted upon the flanking wall advertises for a car dealer.

While there is a ban on new surface parking lots within the downtown, and has been for a very long time, up until the 1970s we continued this horrendously short-sighted trend of trading historic structures for surface parking. Worse, since that time, elected officials, the city government, property owners, and local developers have done absolutely nothing to repair the damage.

Today, some argue that recreations of historic structures are the only appropriate buildings to place into these slots. Others attempt to design sleek, modern structures that evoke more contemporary tastes. Often the best of the proposed replacements have their own potential ripped from them by well intentioned but horridly wrong efforts to force new structures to posses “context,” which means, in plain english, that they must sit down, shut up, and not have any role as buildings in their own right except to not distract from the remaining historic portions.

In truth, all this arguing has done only one thing: maintain the lots as is, places that encourage crime, discourage walking, and lower the value of the most precious and historic core of the city.

10.

SJN Orcas

Portland is, despite the popular notions of many, first and foremost a port. Located 100 miles upriver from the Ocean, it may seem unlikely that Portland could be more than a backwater today, a place that barely clings to its maritime roots through legacy and inertia alone. Such is not, however, the case. While almost no container traffic comes or goes from Portland, the public and private terminals of the city are one of the top export ports in the nation. More impressive yet, the amount of grain handed by Portland is greater than any other port on the continent, and the city holds the crown of third largest grain export terminal in the world.

Here, in April, is one of those grain ships: the San Juan Navigation Company Orcas, less than one year old, departing Portland Harbor bound for Asia, riding low in the river from a hold full of Northwest wheat. Downtown hovers on the horizon, and in the foreground, the river bears the shadow of the high Gothic St. Johns Bridge, probably the most beautiful suspension span in the world.

Looking at the trends, if any, a few emerge. First is more color: last year was all black-and-white, and this year it’s about 50/50. Indeed, one of the images — number 9 — is color print film, Kodak Ektar 100, part of a test run of this film. While I still find black-and-white a strong part of my work, for the first time in recent memory I’m ending the year still having film in the fridge. I think that my long absence from meaningful quantities of color work has given me a more discerning eye for it. I feel more comfortable with it, and I’ve gotten well past that trap of viewing color itself as a substitute for other, more important things, like composition and purpose.

It may or may not be apparent in the images, but this was also a year of greater intent in each image.
About half the shots here were pre-planned or re-shot as refinements of earlier ideas. There were far fewer cohesive projects, and far more site visits for writing and journalism projects. Lastly, there was more travel: less than half of the images here are from the Portland metropolitan region.

As usual, there are still a few rolls from 2011 undeveloped as I write this, and there are further a number of developed images that are as yet unscanned and uncorrected. Looking forward, I expect a return to more planned projects, but I also expect less photography in general, as the year is already filling with many writing projects.

And next, 2012.

(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.

As a writer, This year has been a rather busy one for me, and now there’s yet another assignment to add to the mix. Effective with the August issue, I am now a columnist for Railfan & Railroad magazine. Titled “Departures,” my monthly column replaces that of the late editor emiritus, Jim Boyd, at the front of every issue.

So just what is Railfan & Railroad, or for that matter what the heck is a railfan? 

To be a railfan is to be someone who has a passion for railroads. While some railfans also work in the rail transportation industry, the vast majority of them simply like railroads. This nterest finds its expression in many ways, ranging from riding trains to collecting rail-related items to making photographs of railroads. These passions can range from casual interest to true obsession. There are people, for example, who are compelled to ride every foot of track they can, even if it means waiting for rare passenger train detour movements or chartering a train. There are people who collect books and ephemera to the extent that their houses begin to resemble the closing scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as the ark disappears into a seemingly endless government warehouse of boxes stacked to the rafters. There are people who will, with less than a week’s notice, book a flight to go see and photograph the last run of a once common locomotive on an about-to-be-closed industrial track. Railfan & Railroad is a magazine that specifically caters to the railfan community, in all its geeky glory.

Indeed, “Departures” is a column specifically aimed at highlighting these sort of high-geek raifan acitivites. The column is an exploration of the wide variety of activities that make up this diverse hobby, from the sober and academic to the amusing and absurd, and always just a tad obsessive. I encourage you to pick up a copy, and let me know what you think.

Fresh from the post and the printers: the “Portland Switching District Project: An Overview” in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin

It’s been a busy spring, and there’s a few more publications to add to the list. First up: “The Portland Switching District Project: An Overview,” in the Spring issue of the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin. This is a short text and twelve photos from the series. Unlike the recent show, this article contains images from throughout the switching districts of the Portland area. Many thanks to Bulletin editor Jeff Smith for helping this one fly. Although you cannot find the publication on a newsstand, you can purchase them as back issues directly from the NRHS here for $4, which is a great deal.

I shouldn’t pass on from this topic without also noting that the remainder of this issue is taken up by two great articles by photographer and thinker Jeff Brouws. The first of these is an article on the railroad as landscape, and is illustrated with numerous of his own photographs, along with those of other talented photographers such as Keith Burgess, Wayne Depperman, John Fasulo, Phil Hastings, my friend Scott Lothes, Greg McDonnell, Kevin Scanlon, and the late Richard Steinheimer.

This last name brings up some sad news. If you are a follower of railroad photography, you likely already know that Richard Steinheimer, known affectionately as “Stein”, died on May 4th. The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has been running a tribute to the man on its web site. In addition, in cooperation with Trains Magazine, the Center is running a two part collection of remembrances of the man by other railroad photographers. My own contribution will be up in part two, but for now, I encourage you to read part one, and gather a glimpse of how much the man meant as a photographer, and to those who were fortunate to known him personally, as a human being.

Also while I’m on the subject, I have never taken the time to sum up the Center’s 2011 “Conversations About Photography” conference. The event took place in the middle of last month, and I was privileged to be a part of making it happen. The conference is without question the most interesting rail photography event in North America, and well worth attendance. This year, one of my main tasks was to “live-cast” the event on the Center’s Facebook page. If you’ve been thinking of going, visit there and scroll back to mid April for a bit of flavor of what it’s about. And before I move off this subject, thanks to everyone at the Center — and especially to John Gruber — for including me as part of the team!

For the May, 2011 issue of Trains, I wrote a news story on the continuing efforts of Portland’s Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation to construct a permanent museum complex near the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Also in May, I wrote the lead editorial for Railfan & Railroad Magazine’s issue on Amtrak 40th anniversary. My piece, titled “Amtrak against all odds” examines the nation’s rail passenger carrier today, and makes the case that contrary to conventional wisdom, it has been a brilliant success, as it has held the line against politics and kept the American passenger train from disappearing forever.

For June publications — which in the strange world of publishing has been on the newsstands for two weeks now — the theme is Tacoma, Tacoma, Tacoma. Trains ran a piece on Tacoma’s Union Station, what may be the greatest railway architecture Cinderella story in the Pacific Northwest. This story for Trains focused on the Herculean efforts of those who restored the station, and includes interview material with Jim Merritt, an architect who, in the process of working on the station restoration, undertook some of the craziest stunts I’ve heard of in the name of historic preservation. For Railfan, I produced a smaller story on the importance of the station to the Tacoma community; this one can be viewed online, and includes interior images of the facility, which is now a federal courthouse.

I’ve also been writing a lot of op-eds for the front-of-book in Railfan, filling in after the death of Editor Emeritus Jim Boyd, who previously penned the space. Following the Amtrak column were two more, the first on the mixture of craziness and historic importance that railfanning sometimes plays, and the second on the value of spending time photographing railroads that are more rural and obscure.

Lastly, I have a small feature coming up in Railfan on the Tacoma Link streetcar. The article will be part of the magazine’s Tacoma-focused July issue, in honor of the NRHS national convention in Tacoma from June 20-26.

It’s been a busy spring!

Chicago Union Station, 2006.

It’s April, and that means it’s just about time for another trip to Chicago. Why? To attend my second Conversations on Photography, an annual conference put on by the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. This year’s conference will be the center’s eighth such event.

What is the conference? Part convention, part multimedia show, the event — which lasts three days but the bulk of which occurs on the second, full day — is a magnet for serious photographers, writers, and those in the railroad publishing world. It is a great place to meet and talk with others who are putting serious effort into their work. Last year, for example, I go the pleasure of meeting legendary photographer David Plowden, Railfan & Railroad editor Steve Barry, and one of my favorite contemporary rail photographers, Lew Ableidinger. Although the conference does have a serious tone, and does take place in the academic environs of the Lake Forest College campus, it’s also a very enjoyable affair. The presentations have plenty of entertainment value and the crowd is a good mix of amiable folks.

Of course, for a lover of cities such as myself, a trip to Chicago really needs no justification. Due to my involvement as conference staff, I sadly won’t have much time to explore the city, but I will be able to correct a deficiency of my last three visits: I will finally ride both the CTA (aka the El) and Metra. (Strangely, the only rail transit in Chicagoland I’ve ridden is the far more obscure South Shore!)

Last year, I had attended merely to enjoy the show, but thanks to the irrepressible Otto Vondrak, I got roped into a last minute staff gig. This year, I’m on staff from day one, helping make the conference move smoothly. Furthermore, this year I will be doing some live reporting from the conference, with photos and posts going up on the Center’s Facebook page. You do not have to be a Facebook member to view the page, so if you are not able to attend, consider checking in there to see what’s going on.

First and foremost, I want to thank the City Club for making the show possible, and in particular thank Amy Harris for her patience and assistance. I also want to thank six people in particular: Joseph Brugger, Dan Haneckow, Scott Lothes, Daniel J. Sheets, Otto Vondrak, and Kyle Weismann-Yee. Each of them contributed by sponsoring an image in the show. I also want to thank everyone who made it out to see the exhibit. While this was a small show, it was a step in a much larger process, especially for this particular project.

Thanks all, and updates on the project will be found both here and on the project new feed.

After months of work, a project I am quite proud of is about to become available. Nearly a year ago, I was approached by fellow photographer Joel Jensen. Joel has been photographing scenes of the American West for decades, especially images of vernacular landscape such as churches, motels, and railway depots. For this last body of work, Joel issued me a challenge: to write ~10,000 words on the American railway depot to accompany about forty of his images, the whole to occupy an entire issue of the National Railway Historical Society‘s Bulletin,.

Needless to say this was a big task! Joel gave me a pretty free hand to set the details of the piece, so after kicking a few quick ideas around I set to work on one of the biggest single writing projects I’ve undertaken in a while.

To a lover of culture, the American railway depot is particularly fascinating. It is an artifact of the country’s Industrial Age, and as such its changing roles provide a useful yardstick by which to measure vast American cultural shifts. Once the center of the community as well as the prototype of aloof corporate hegemony, the depot has traded its power for a potent and largely misleading symbolism.

They’re here! They’re here!

Joel’s photographs are a stunning review of this glacial-scale decline in power. From the soaring towers of the grand urban terminals to the defeatism of the so-called “Amshack” platform shelter, Joel captures less the typical nostalgia of loss than the somewhat sharper pangs of regret, neglect, and wanton destruction. There is a certain and potent irony in seeing structures built to last for ages tossed aside like a deer carcass beside the road, not yet a century old. Equally moving are the small rural depots, reduced to poor paint, infrequent service, ignominy, and despair.

To try and capture a sense of that in the words I penned for the piece was a tall order, but I hope I might have at least scratched at the surface of some of the truths buried within Joel’s photos. If you can find a copy — the Bulletin is available online here — please pick it up and let me know what you think.

Last but not least, thanks to Joel Jensen for an excellent collaboration, to Buleltin editor Jeff Smith, and to everyone who made this project possible.

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.