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.

This month I have two articles in the Online Extras section at the website of TRAINS Magazine. Both of these stories were written for a content extra that promotes the activities of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, whose excellent 2010 conference I attended (and impromptu got drafted into staff for) in April.

The first of these articles focused on taking a project-based approach to railroad photography. As with many genre-driven photographic subcultures, the railroad photography crowd has a tendency to try and “shoot everything” and to try and capture subjects before change wipes them from memory. One possible approach to dealing with this successfully is to try and make better predictions about what is likely to be gone in the near future.

My approach, however, is different. I believe capturing the present before it is lost is less important than being cohesive in what you, as a photographer, are trying to say. The piece which ran earlier in August advocated this approach and explained how and why it can lead to better photographic results.

Today, the second half of the two-part series was put up on the web. In this article, I share one of my recent projects and use it to explain how I apply the project-based approach to railroad photography.

This is the first public unveiling of a series I have been spending a considerable amount of my time shooting. By-and-large, this is my attempt to create a railroad photography project that doesn’t rest on the romanticism and Grand-Style traditions that dominate this genre. It also represents a much more distinctive personal stylistic voice applied to the subject. I have to say, using this series as a basis of a teaching moment was a bit… hairy. Showing a major project to the public for the first time can be a nerve-wracking thing.

One last note: my thanks go out to photographers Wes Carr, the Center’s Scott Lothes, and Kyle Weismann-Yee, for contributing images to both articles. You made me look good.

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.

Zeb has been making images of the bridges of Portland for some time now, mostly the Fremont and St. Johns. In recent months, however, Zeb began to make a series that was meant to capture the essence of all of Portland’s varied bridges. Anyone who knows much about my photographic tastes knows that bridges are a strong draw for me as well, so it should be no surprise that I looked forward to each new image as Zeb revealed them on his Flicker stream. Check them out yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree that they’re great stuff.

Now, Zeb is trying to take this series to the next step, and share it with the world beyond Flicker with an exhibit and a book. Unfortunately, exhibits are not cheap, especially once you add up the costs of all the matts, frames, and such.

In short, Zeb needs your help. Zeb is raising money for this exhibit on Kickstarter, a site for creative fundraising.

The premise of Kickstarter is simple: within a given time frame, people can pledge to support a specific project proposal such as Zeb’s. If the total is reached before the deadline, then your pledge is paid out, and the project moves forward. If the total isn’t reached by the deadline, nobody pays anything. Payments are all handled through Amazon, a solid proven e-commerce provider.

By supporting Zeb’s project, you’ll help be part of seeing his work in an exhibit sometime this year. If altruism isn’t enough alone, Zeb’s offering a range of thank-you gifts, from postcards and postcard sets to prints to a book of images from the series.

For full disclosure, I have nothing vested here other than seeing some cool photos get some good exposure. I only really know Zeb through his work on Flickr and the fact that he’s usually the guy behind the counter at Blue Moon Camera when I pick up or drop off film.

So if you like Zeb’s bridge images, consider going over and making a pledge to support his project. The pledge period ends July 28th and any donation, no matter how small, will help.

And to Zeb, best of luck, and I look forward to my set of thank-you postcards.

Back from the Center for Railroad Photography and Art’s 2010 “Conversations About Photography” conference in Chicagoland, I’ve got a few brief things to catch up on.

First, Railfan and Railroad has published two of my photos and a short article about the relationship between the railroad and the Guild’s Lake industrial park in Portland (which I also briefly wrote about here a while ago). The story and photos were run on the Extra Board, a new web exclusive monthly feature on Railfan’s new web site. The only downside is that (right now at least) there is no archive for articles on the Extra Board, so once the July story goes up in about 30 days, the story and photos will disappear from the web.

I’m particularly happy with the photos they ran, especially the lead. (I’d link to it on my Flickr but really, go see it at Railfan’s site while it’s up.) Thanks to the boys at R&R for running this.

Second, the other photograph published with this story is a close-up of a Keline switch lock, one of many that can still be found in Guild’s Lake. This is also a photograph from a new series I am currently shooting, a long-term project to try and break through some of the conventions of the railroad photography genre. Expect more about this process over the coming year.

For more photos of Guild’s Lake’s, check out the Flickr Job 101 set or see everything of mine from Guild’s.

This week, a friend picked up a copy of David Plowden’s retrospective, Vanishing Point, a book I once wrote a Russian-novel length review of here.

I’ve come to be a great admirer of Plowden. His photography is simultaneously straightforward yet lyrical. Unlike the works of, say, the New Topographics movement, Plowden’s work doesn’t imply a value judgement. Instead, the reaction provoked is more emotional, and is usually described as loss. He has famously described his career as a photographer as being “one step ahead of the wrecking-ball.”

What does that have to do with this image? Many things. The subject itself — Portland’s Guilds Lake industrial park — is slowly fading from its railroad industrial past. More significantly, this image is part of an in-progress series, an intentionally unromantic take on the railroad world. Yet, precisely by being intentionally unromantic, this image (and its series kin) become about loss too, the loss of the romantic viewpoint.

Maybe loss is integral to photography. Cameras, after all, have always held the promise of extending the moment, of being an external memory device. First steps. Birthdays. Weddings. Friends. You know the drill. You want to capture memories, preserve them before they, too, become victims of loss. And besides, entropy is not only a lot easier to find than growth, it is required to precede it: the first sign of newness is usually the sweeping away of something old.

And in the ultimate sense of Time’s irony, it’s barely possible to stay ahead of the wrecking ball anymore. The wrecking ball is going the way of, well, the wrecking ball.

Since I’ve discussed both David Plowden and the New Topographics, there are a few more things I should mention. First, the New Topographics exhibit is together again, and on tour. The closest it will get to the Pacific Northwest will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, starting in July. There’s also a new book out, and I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in landscape photography or critical photography. Second, Plowden has a book forthcoming this fall, Requiem for Steam from W. W. Norton. Keep an eye out for it.

Portion of NW 5th Avenue, Portland

Over the last few years, I’ve been working through a significant shift in my photography, and as a result I’ve been experimenting with a number of new techniques and ideas. One of those has been the notion of typologies.

Typologies are a photographic tool that owe much of their heritage to Twentieth Century photographers of the “New Topographics” movement, and they in turn to pop artists like Ed Ruscha. The idea, in brief, is to make a set of images that illustrate something in a classified way. Think of each photo as an illustration of a typical, repeatable element, much like a letter in an alphabet, and you get why it was known as a typology. Ruscha’s 1965 work, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, was perhaps a grandaddy to them all, documenting every building along a length of LA’s famed boulevard. It’s influence was far and wide, not just in photography circles but in urban planning and design. It did not surprise me in the least when I opened up a long-range planning document from last year to find an exact reproduction of Ruscha’s work, only in color and of Highway 99W.

With a strong interest in culture and place, the typology seemed like a natural way to investigate a story that has fascinated me for some time, the simultaneous decline of Portland’s historic Chinatown, and the rise of a new, more broadly Asian community on the far southeast side of town. I wondered to myself, has the new Chinatown along Powell, Division, and SE 82nd become larger than the old? Borrowing Ruscha’s idea and photographing the street fronts seemed like a logical choice.

It is moments like these where you learn that you are as much defined but what you do not do as by anything else. As soon as I beheld my hundred plus images of both old and new Chinatowns, something felt off. No image felt like it could stand on its own. The images themselves were straight documentary, sure, and I respect that ideal, but they were almost too documentary. They were without art, or more tellingly without thought.

What suddenly occurred to me was that there was almost no difference in the end product of my work and the end product of, well, Google Street View. Sure, I had higher pretensions, and I was freezing a specific moment forever. Oh, and I was using film — black-and-white film — which guaranteed that what I was doing was art, not just pedestrian photographic mapping for the masses. Right?

Or not.

Not long after this experience, I began a photography journal for myself. (I’ve made notes about photography endlessly over the years, but they were always scattered about my various notebooks, never in one specific place.) The first page of that journal I reserved for one short statement, a note to myself. It reads:

The sweeping view, the grand vista, the bird’s-eye perspective. These are all classic ways of shooting the city, of trying to capture the greatness on a metropolitan scale. Such perspectives have been the staple of urban photography since the medium was born in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Once reformism shook up that genre around the turn of the century, however, it’s been far more in vogue to shoot critical images, photographs meant to provoke social change. While undoubtedly effective and necessary, they too have become a kind of cliche, raising decay to almost celebratory levels.

The two forces tug at my vision and my heart. I love cities, but I also value photography more than candy making. More and more, the tension caused by these two forces has resulted in a more personal take on the urban form, one that emphasizes that which can be touched, that which is intimate, and reduces the grand landscapes and the landmarks and monoliths of civilization to something more akin to context in a very personal quest for sense-of-place.

This image, of a vestigial neighborhood off Portland’s Interstate Avenue, is an example of that thought process, and represents for me a significant new direction in my photography. Or is it, perhaps, a direction that was lurking in my work for years and that only now I have come to recognize? Sort of like waking up one day and realizing that you are in love with a person, a place, or an idea?

Portland really is a transportation city. It seems that we can never have enough different modes of transportation, much less use them as officially intended. We have light rail that behaves like a metro, commuter trains trying to behave like light rail, and last but not least a streetcar that sometimes behaves like a streetcar, but other times tries to be something more like light rail as well. Then there’s the busses, cars, boats and ships, and oddities like the aerial tram.

The end result is that by-and-large there’s always something moving in town, always some vehicle loaded with people going to and fro different places. It’s also a cacophony of sharp edges and curves, smooth shiny reflections and grime, stillness and motion. It makes Portland — and especially downtown — a target rich environment.

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.

A brief homage to my friend Scott, who will never live down his association with chairs. From the newly refurbished TriMet Bus Mall in Portland, Oregon, September 2009.

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.

As with the previous two years, the order is chronological, and clicking on the image will yield the image’s Flickr page.

* * *
1.

February in Portland, and a real urban survivor shows up on the streets in the form of an International Harvester Metro van. (It was in use by a window washer service.) This was part of a test roll for a friend’s Nikon FG, picked up at a garage sale for under $10. The film, of course, is T-Max.

2.

King Street Station, Seattle, in March, looking down the stairs at the platforms for the commuter trains to Tacoma and Everett. A single figure in red makes her way to a train home.

3.

Another image from March in Seattle, this one from one of the less restored sections of King Street Station.

4.

Yet another King Street shot from Seattle in March, this one of some rather interesting automotive subjects. Can’t get too much more contrasty than this.

5.

Breakfast Every Day! The only way service at the Dockside could get better is if they served breakfast all day, too. July.

6.

In July, I got reacquainted with an old friend: my first SLR, a Pentax K-1000. One of the first rolls through it was a heavily transit filled one, and included this shot, taken on the TriMet Bus 15 to Montgomery Park. Kodak TMY.

7.

Another Pentax shot, again on Kodak TMY, this time of a gellateria in Northwest Portland, not far from Powell’s Books. A very hot day in August.

8.

In December, looking west towards the Steel Bridge on a cold evening. The structure is seen through the foil of a pedestrian and bike overpass over the Union Pacific tracks on the east bank of the Willamette.

9.

Still later in December, I visited Vancouver, B.C., where I caught this image on the G9. Something about the way the building towered up over Gastown made me think of the original (1995) Ghost in the Shell movie, with it’s Hong Kong inspired towers.

10.

My last shot is also from Vancouver in December, in this case from a ramen shop called Kintaro, in the city’s West End neighborhood.

* * *
And that wraps up 2009. To be frank, most of these are snapshots from the G9, usually shot to accompany posts on civics21, a blog about public policy and politics. As a result, few of these are images I’d consider as intended to be art. That said, the amount of film I shot during the year was possibly among the highest I have ever shot, and I am adding to my negative files rather rapidly. In addition, I have a number of photography projects I am working on but that are not yet ready for airing. I may get to finishing at least one or two of them in 2010. Stay tuned.

At the Lansdowne SkyTrain station in Richmond, B.C.

Sometimes I think that one of the main reasons I feel I am not particularly skilled as a photo journalist is that I’m just not enough of an a-hole for the job. On a recent trip to the largely ethnically Chinese city of Richmond, B.C., I realized that more strongly than ever before.

I had gathered only a few photographs that day, mostly of SkyTrain and of a few of the signs around the Richmond area, whose total lack of English turned the mundane into a visual feast, in the same way that listening to an opera sung in a language I can’t understand — say Italian — is far more moving to me than most songs sung in English.

Walking past a grocer’s doors, I peered inside to see dozens of families sorting through piles of fruit, looking for the best orange or persimmon. I had been just about to raise the camera to take the photo when I stopped. What was I doing? Why was I taking this picture? Oh, look, whole crowds of slant-eyed people!

Although their ethnicity served to make my actions more immediately felt, this wasn’t really an issue of race at all. It was more an issue of respect. I was a guest in these people’s community, and in my mind I had turned them into zoo animals to make picture postcards of. It was a sin I was sure, in that moment, I had committed numerous times.

I tucked my camera back into a pocket of my vast coat.

As a writer, I think you can say and do far worse things — slander is so much easier with the written word — but somehow, at the time, the invasive act so central to photojournalism seemed worse.

Fall and Winter can be a dual-edged sword for photographers.

On the down side, colors often become muted, and days are shorter thus cutting down how long you can remain outside shooting without the complication of tripods and time exposures or the use of high ISO settings / films.

On the other hand, the light is often quite low, providing striking side lighting on objects normally far less illuminated during Summer. And those same muted colors can be an asset, reducing the palette and emphasizing form and composition over richness.

These cooler months and shorter days can also provide interesting atmospheric conditions, like the slight mist seen here veiling Portland’s Steel Bridge on a cold December day.

Nearly one year ago, I, a dedicated film photographer, did something unthinkable: I bought a digital camera. No, I hadn’t eaten one too many happy pills. No, I hadn’t drank my fixer one too many times. (Mmm, fixer!) No, rather, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to stop burning film on snapshots and marginal images, and a digital camera would help me fix that.

For the last decade, the Canon G series have been amongst the best performing digital cameras in the world. These little machines have been the backbone of advanced amateur photographers, especially photographers shooting candid images — you know, street photographers, wannabe pornographers, and stalkers. Over the years, though, the G series has wandered. As Canon introduced more and cheaper and better digital SLR cameras, the company began intentionally crippling the G series, to reduce in-house competition. Things came to a head when, with the introduction of the G7, RAW file format capabilities went the way of the 110 instamatic.

So it is with some trepidation that the news of the G7’s replacement was greeted in 2007. What would be gone next? No manual controls? No viewfinder? No hotshoe?

But no. The bitch, as Sir Elton would say, is back. Meet the Canon Powershot G9.

The Canon Powershot G9, courtesy khedra @ flickr

Like all its G series forebearers, the G9 is a handsome machine. It has the classic lines of a mid-20th century rangefinder. The body is sleek and matte black. And unlike many of the competing cameras in the G9’s market segment, it isn’t made of the same material as Jacko’s nose; the G9 is metal bodied with only a small plastic piece closing in the top of the camera. The result is a body that feels solid and rugged. It also makes the camera heavy; unlike, say, a Fuji Finepix S100, if you swung this thing on it’s neck strap you could probably kill someone with it. This handy trait should make the G9 quite popular in, say, Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles.

But forget how it looks. What really matters is how the G9 performs as a camera. The first thing you notice when you pick it up is… dials! The G9, like every proper camera ever made, has little round turnable dials! In this case, one controls ISO, while the other scrolls through shooting mode. While the camera does have special “idiot modes”, they are mercifully buried under a single dial entry labelled “SCN”. The rest of the dial cycles through video, a panorama mode, an all automatic mode, program, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, and two customizable settings.

The back of the camera sports some buttons, along with a rotating selector, and a truly massive 3″ LCD screen. Although bright sunlight can still play havoc with the latter, the LCD is unusually bright and has a wide acceptable viewing angle. Unfortunately the screen is hard attached to the back — no fold out tilting screen like older G series cameras, meaning that its a bit harder to do those sneaky, creepy candid shots. Those buttons allow the user to customize the camera settings, including –mercifully! — the ability to turn off those dumb “look at me I’m taking a picture!” system sounds and that absolutely pointless fake shutter mirror sound.

Once you’ve shed the poser features of the camera, you discover all sorts of other customizable options, like how long the LCD will stay on after no activity is detected, or if you want digital zoom, or enabling advanced features like image stabilization and red eye reduction. And of course, you can also set it to remember whatever settings you are in now via one of those customizable dial entries up top. Be warned that it will not only remember your white balance, color mode, control method, and so on, but also your exact aperture and shutter settings. Be sure to set it when you’re in typical conditions for the mode you’re saving, or you might find yourself constantly resetting the shutter speed from 1/8th like I was. I didn’t bother playing with the idiot modes; they are, after all, for idiots.

Image quality is outstanding. The camera has a whopping 12.1 megapixels. To put that in perspective, when the Nikon D1 came out just about nine years ago and revolutionized newsrooms with digital photography, it had 4.3 megapixels. The G9 has nearly three times that. That’s more megapixels than the original digital Rebel, more megapixels than Nikon D80, more megapixels than the Moon. Images shot at ISO 400 came out crisp with only a marginal grain that is comparable to most 400 speed films, and ISO tops out at a stunning (albeit somewhat grainy) 3200!

Basic adjustments like white balance, color modes, and the like is easily accessed via a button on the back, and can be made rapidly on the fly. Intriguingly the camera includes a built-in neutral density filter, three different metering modes, and the ability to fine tune flash output. You can even select auto bracketing, and switching between resolutions, image sizes, and file formats can all be handled in seconds. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Of course, not all is perfect with the G9. The manual focusing is accomplished by hitting a button on the camera back and then using a rotating selector to fine tune the focus, which can be monitored on the LCD display. This is fine except that the LCD version of a focus screen is still relatively small and hard to judge by.

In addition, the G9 feels too small. In the typical “how small can we go” digital camera theory, the G9 is a lot smaller in person than in photos. The big screen on the back will within seconds of opening the box begin to collect thumbprints from your left hand. You get the impression that if Canon had stopped trying to make the camera smaller, there would have been room for a slightly more intuitive manual focusing system.

…Or perhaps to fix the viewfinder. Now on a camera in this price point, you’d expect the viewfinder to be sharp and poised. And… you’d be wrong. The image seen though it is on 80% of the visible scene, and what’s worse, it’s not centered, horizontally or vertically. It’s utter rubbish. You could always get used to cropping your images, but what’s the point of 12.1 megapixels if you can’t use them all? The least they could have done is properly centered the 80% you can see. Ironically, it is equipped with a manually adjustable diopter to accommodate for the user’s eyesight. To see what? 80% of a scene with no idea what portion that 80% is of? Totally useless!

Still, the overall feel of holding the G9 in your hand is hard to beat. It feels like a quality product, and despite a totally useless viewfinder and a body size about 20% too small, it quickly becomes very intuitive to shoot with. Putting it through its paces on city streets, the G9 becomes a fast blast for quick images. And its size is also a plus point, as it can easily be tucked into a pocket or under a coat and not attract any attention at all.

There is one more downside, however. After a hard day of shooting, the next morning the G9 will not have your breakfast fixed. This is actually one of the camera’s redeeming features. Most camera makers offer machines these days that not only take photographs, but do your washing, balance your checkbook, call your mother, take the dog for a walk, and iron your shirts. And all this before tea time. But does the G9 have any of these extra features? No. The G9 is a photographer’s camera. Sure, it has some useless idiot modes, but with the turn of a sleek and very familiar feeling metal dial, the camera becomes a precision image making machine.

The Powershot G9 is simply brilliant. I can’t say enough good things about it. Weighing in at nearly $500, it’s not a cheap camera. But for the price of a crippled entry level dSLR made of recycled styrofoam coffee cups and cheese, you can have one of the best made, best performing digital point-and-shoot cameras ever. Canon just announced an improved version called the G10 with added megapixels, but really, a good closeout or used G9 is a much better bargain. It’s a more than worthy successor to the 35mm rangefinders of the last century.

The last time I shot film in any serious way was in the middle of 2008. At the time, I was in the middle of a number of simultaneous changes in my life, professional, academic, and personal. The end result of that was that I had somehow lost my way when it came to photography. The passion was simply gone, the meaning lost. The idea that I would never make a photograph again struck me, even in the darkest hours, as unlikely. I knew better than that. I knew it wasn’t a matter of if I kept making photographs, but when, and what of. In the meanwhile, though, I packed away the Nikons and swore to myself that I was taking a sabbatical. My only tool in the meanwhile would be the G9, a camera I considered to be magnificent but still only a toy, and even that I used only sparingly.

Yet events conspired without my approval. First, a friend picked up a Nikon FG at a garage sale. I, the camera “expert” (heh, got him fooled!) got the honor of testing it to be certain it was fully functional. So sometime in January, I took out the FG and its good old student-standard 50mm lens and ran a roll of TMY through it. Holding a film camera again — especially a manual like the FG — felt good. The images produced weren’t too bad either, just a random collection of downtown Portland street photos, but still, not a disappointment.

From the test roll: A food cart at S.W. 2nd & Oak, Portland.

The greatest irony, however, struck the following month.

My first real camera — read SLR — was a Pentax K-1000. Most anyone shooting film knows these cameras. They were small, solid, fairly light, and pretty durable. They had lenses that were rather small when compared to what we use today. (Their narrow size made them fit inside of chain link, a very handy attribute for urban shooters.) This one cost me $150, used. I didn’t have enough, so my mother went halves with me on it. I was 17, and the camera went everywhere with me after that, serving as my “mechanical sketchbook”.

Later, I went Nikon, financing the “upgrade” by helping my brother with a mural project for Salvador Molly’s on Belmont. (The mural, sadly, has since been painted over with beige paint. Bastards.) The theory behind the switch was that when I finally made the leap to Nikon, I’d have a stock of Nikon lenses to use. It was a logical choice, but it left me with my Pentax gear unused. I lent and then subsequently sold off the K-1000 to a friend, with the promise that if he ever wanted to sell it, I’d have first dibs.

And now, with the Nikon gear sitting idle in a cardboard box, my phone rang.

The rest is self evident. Today, the K-1000 — complete with the lens strap my father made me still attached — sits on my workbench, alongside the G9 and my Canonet. I have yet to run film through it, but I have no doubt that I will.

In the meanwhile, you can view the rest of the Nikon FG test roll shots over at flickr.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

This is why it surprised me, in some ways, when I found myself able to pick out ten shots again for this year. (Thanks go to Dave Styffe for the inspiration on this one.)

As with last year, the order is chronological, and clicking on the image will yield the image’s Flickr page.

* * *
1.

In February, my friend Scott and I headed into Portland to do some shooting for half a day. Our main targets were transit, including both MAX and the Portland Streetcar. Such shooting is usually a bit like fish in a barrel, but at the same time it can get really boring for the same reason. That said, the effort is worth it, as with this image, one I feel rather proud of. To me, it captures the essence of Portland — classic 19th century buildings, a modern light rail vehicle, and every completely slicked down from rain.

2.

Graffiti is often considered the railfan’s bane, the evil enemy. Maybe it’s for precisely those reasons that I am attracted to it? Leaving aside self-examination of my contrarian tendencies, this image stands out to me less for any particular artistic merit than because of the content. It is the first of many images from this year in this post that were selected for emotional reasons as much as artistic ones.

Here is the interior wall of a highly vandalized railroad car. Among all the grunge, the burnt out detritus, and the haphazard spray-painted tags, there were a few poems written in crayon or paint markers. This was one of them. The inscription reads:

“Transit:
lighter than air
than water
than lips
light, light
Your body is the footprint of your body
– David Paz”

A very random thing to find in such a place.

3.

This was just me, having fun. Scott and I were transit foaming again, and this shot was a “hey hold my beer while I do this” sort of thing. It was the blue hour, after sunset, and I was shooting at ISO 400 but had no ‘pod. A bike rack made a good substitute; out of a series of shots, this one stood out as having the right balance of distinguishable features and motion streaks.

Okay, it’s a gimmick shot, sue me.

4.

This scrawling was on the side of an abandoned gas station in Dundee, Oregon. This structure was endlessly fascinating to me. Dundee — once-upon-a-time no more than an old-fashioned road town — considers itself quite upscale, a sort of Napa of Oregon. This gas station is the perfect microcosm of the town. It was once a traditional gas station. It was then converted to an antique store, and still sports fading Old English signage to that effect. However, it never panned out, and is now abandoned, housing a few old mattresses.

That is the real Dundee, not the WIne Country snootiness.

And yes, there’s more than a little Jeff Brouws in this shot.

5.

This is a shot I took on my only day at Chehalis this year. It was a bittersweet weekend. For one, C-Town was hit by massive flooding in December of 2007, and the line was largely out of service — trains were only mile or so jaunts down the track, backing the other way — and the future of running remained unclear. For another, changing circumstances in my life were making it quite likely that this would be my last trip as a conductor for a long, long time, maybe ever.

The day is still young, and the 15 is being fired up for the runs. I’m in an old UP CA-7 caboose that we use as a crew car, changing into my uniform. This is a view I have seen off and on for four years, and feeling a bit melancholy, I snapped a frame off.

6.

Factual: this is near Knappa, on the Portland & Western’s Astoria District, more commonly known as the “A-Line”. The same floods that hit C-Town in December 2007 also packed a wallop on the coast up here, and in this case blew a large hole in the right-of-way. By July, the like is still not fixed. With no shippers beyond the damage, it remains like this today.

Less factual: it’s the imagery that makes this work for me. On the macro level, its a metaphor for the situation that a lot of marginal branch lines are facing in today’s Pacific Northwest. On a micro level, its a metaphor for something deeper, an interest being drowned by larger powers.

7.

Although I did take a few other images later in the year that had railroad elements in them, this photograph is one of four of what I consider to be my last railroad photographs. How permanent that is I don’t know, and certainly I didn’t plan that it would be this one.

The location is Salmonberry, Oregon, along the Port of Tillamook Bay Railroad. This is yet another instance of damage from the December 2007 storms that remains unrepaired. More than a year later, the chances that it ever will be grow slimmer by the day. The POTB is truly living up to it’s legend as the Northwestern Pacific of Oregon.

I think it’s a rather ironic but appropriate subject for closing a chapter.

8.

This is one of those “railroad in the frame but not the subject” shots I mentioned above. Like the first of my ten, it’s a shot that appeals because of the visual shorthand it has. Portland, near the north end of the Depot Yard at Portland Union Station, with new condos looming (and mostly empty) in the background.

9.

A very close friend came home one day in quite a mood, and then wrote this on his sandwich box. It then sat on my TV table for the next three months or so rather than going to work with him.

My old photography teacher would probably yell at me for the crumbs and tell me to use a spot brush to remove them, regardless of whether they were there or not. Kinda reminds me of the apocryphal story of Walker Evans and the flees on the bed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

10.

My last shot is from September, and like many of my images this year, it is both introspective and contains a link to friends and family. In this case, it’s my brother’s bookshelf at his apartment. I wish I had his organizational tendencies, but it’s just not me — to picture my workspaces you’d need to add lots of random papers with notes scrawled on them that I no longer need.

* * *
And that wraps up 2008. It was quite a year. For me, things will never quite be the same again, and though I look forward to a far brighter 2009, I can’t help but look back wistfully on 2008. I lived through a lot of changes, and witnessed many people close to me face similar or greater challenges. Although I did not travel to the Midwest for the first time since 2005, it seems I still travelled as much as ever, and still spent time with good friends. But there is a strong emotional pull the year has for me, a sense of loss, often of things I cannot quite put a name to. I think that shows through in a lot of these images.

I can’t make any promises for 2009, but I have a sneaking suspicion there will be some more images about this time of year. Now the question is, where are the 2008 ten favorite from Blair?

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957
By Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen, Eds. Oregon State University Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/; 12.4 x 12 x 1.5 in; hardbound; 360 pages, 9 color, 9 hand-tinted, and 116 b/w photos, 2 maps; $75.00

One of the last things the world likely needs is a photo book on the Columbia River Gorge. This scenic area, with its numerous waterfalls, mountains, scenic vistas, and easy freeway access is probably the most over-photographed region of the Pacific Northwest. One might be pressed to say that there is nothing new left to see. And you’d be right — but there is a lot left to see that is old, as is proved by the release of Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957.

Wild Beauty places the history of photography in the Gorge at the forefront. The compilers have chosen the period of 1867 to 1957 as their focus, the latter being the date when The Dalles Dam flooded Celilo Falls. The book opens with a broad essay on the river’s geological and anthropological history, and the subsequent attempts to use tools of the “industrial revolution” such a photography to record those things. It’s a good overview of what the book hopes to illustrate, if a bit over-familiar to the Pacific Northwest reader. The most valuable segment of this text is contained in its last two pages, where we meet some of the Gorge’s earliest photographers, such as Joseph Bucthel and Carleton Watkins.

While Buchtel’s work is considered to be “unimpressive”, Watkins’ work is the entirety of the first of five sections of plates in the book. It’s a wise and fitting choice, as Watkins is a skilled artist, a man who had cut his teeth making the photographs of Yosemite that would convince Congress to save it as the first national park. It is a miracle that as many prints as shown in the book even exist; the authors point out that many of his glass plate negatives were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Watkins brings his skills to bear on the Columbia Gorge, making images at a time of great transition. Sure, the book’s title suggests an emphasis on natural beauty, yet what we see even in these, the earliest photographs of the work is the firm hand of man, altering the landscape. While some of the images will prove familiar, but as local historian Dan Haneckow pointed out to me, others are more obscure or bear re-examination. A prime example of this is Plate 6, a moderately familiar image of one of the old portage railroads during the 1860s. Look closely at the back, however, and you discover a flatcar carrying a Conestoga wagon as used on the Oregon Trail. Was this a late part of the great migration, taking advantage of a more modern alternative to risking the rapids or taking the long and rough Barlow Road? If so, it’s a rare glimpse indeed.

Watkins brings us these gems of zeitgeist, but he is not simply a documentary man. Many of his images have a sensitivity and an artistic composition that makes them excellent even today. Their sharpness, their haunting familiarity makes them seem recent rather than distant. This is but the first of many times a reader will find themselves staring into the distant past and yet feeling intimate with it, as if what has changed, great as the changes have been, is less than what is the same.

The next section deals with the images of various local commercial photographers who followed in Watkins’ footsteps. The subject matter these photographers chose to shoot tended to concentrate on the more intimate scale of the Gorge, and here we see some of the first images of the native population. It is here where we first glimpse Celilo as a force of nature, rather than an impediment to trade. There are surprises here too, like the great sand dunes that used to lurk on the east side of The Dalles, or vast seas of Canadian ice. A few hand-tinted images pop through, but primarily we are still given monochromes of various tints.

Section three concentrates on the rise of a new phenomenon: the amateur. Thanks to the advances of technology, photography by the turn of the twentieth century was becoming almost common. For the first time it was now possible for someone who was not a professional (or a very very eccentric amateur) to make photographs. Most notably, the two amateurs that the compilers show us are different in yet another way: they are Lily White and Sarah Ladd, women. Professionals had been an all male bastion, but the amateur photography movement gave women something more meaningful to do other than paint china plates or embroider. Yet White & Ladd were not just random photographers in the wilds; they were connected enough in the growing intellectual photography circles that they were members of Alfred Stieglitz’s inner circle. Their images are peculiarly timeless, feeling not far removed from images made in our own time. The cause is uncertain — perhaps it is a certain sharpness and a scope that is not nearly so sweeping as the earlier panorama-mania. Perhaps, too, we see here the first technically proficient pedestrian imagery of the Gorge, the great-grandmother of every amateur’s weekend snapshots.

Section four deals with perhaps one of the most familiar aspects of Gorge photography, the tourism oriented image. These photographs were made primarily by commercial photographers for the railroads and the highway promoters. Here are the photographic legends of the area, including the iconic views of waterfalls, scenic highway viaducts, and the view from Crown Point. It is during this time that the modern scenic Columbia River Gorge — thanks largely to the photographers who promoted it — acquires its classic identity. No longer is the region a somewhat frightening place, a place of hardship and travail, but instead it is a playground, a quick drive from your suburban bungalow at a bracing 35 miles-per-hour in your Model T. Many of the images are further “gilded” through garish hand coloring.

If such boosterism seems to cheapen the river, the next and final section of the book is the most tragic of all. Titled “The Engineered River”, this segment delivers to us in stunning visual images the return of the river to a cruder understanding. The water now is no more than an unharnessed power source, something to be exploited for human advancement. In some ways, however, the images we see here of dynamiting channels, the construction of great concrete dams, and the burial of cultural treasures has more in common with than different from each of the previous understandings of the Gorge; each saw it as a resource to be utilized, whether for transportation, tourism dollars, or energy. From a photographic standpoint, this chapter contains two new developments, the first being the use of true color imagery. The second and perhaps more complex development is the aerial photograph, further detaching the viewer from reality on the ground. It is perhaps appropriate for a time when men tried to drastically alter the river that their point-of-view f choice was from the height of a God’s eye view.

The book closes with little further commentary. A brief (one page) epilogue is included, and following this are plate listings (but without thumbnails), notes, and acknowledgments. The latter is lengthy: many of the images scene in the book are from private collectors and have never been seen in public or print before.

Visually, the content of this book is exceptionally good. There are many remarkable plates and they are presented in a logical order that makes their context more evident, both as indicators of how the Columbia Gorge was framed and viewed, as well as how landscape photography developed and grew. That said, the book is not without faults. The introduction, although able, is dry and does not give much of a feel for the flavor of the Gorge; an essay by a writer of regional or topical relevance would have been most welcome. This is even more the case for the epilogue, which felt far too short and left me wanting more.

Fit and finish on the book is excellent. Some other reviews have noted missing pages or other assembly problems; this reviewer’s copy had no such defects. This book is hefty — you could use it as a weapon if needed. It is perhaps as large as was practical to make it, but sometimes you do wish it could have been bigger, for yet more detail in the images. That said, image reproduction is high quality.

I’m tempted to simply give this book an outright recommendation and say to you “you must buy it”. However, as I alluded to in the beginning of this review, I have qualms about yet another photography book on the Columbia River Gorge. Does the world need another? More importantly, do you need this one? It is against this skepticism that I come out with the answer, yes, you do. If you are a follower of regional landscape photography, then this book, more than any other, is essential to understanding the nature of the medium. The book has the right balance of historical overview, context, and precious images. If you want a discount coffee table book to send your distant relatives, so they can understand where you live, this is not your book. Rather, Wild Beauty is a chronicle of the inter-relationship between photography and the Columbia Gorge, and thus a must-have for the bookshelf of any serious regional landscape photographer, or followers of the same.

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957. is available from Powells, Amazon as well as directly from the publisher.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

Approaching Nowhere
Photography by Jeff Brouws with essays by William L. Fox and Jeff Brouws. W.W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 12.3 x 11.6 x 0.8 in; hardbound; 160 pages, 112 color photos, 1 illustration; $50.00

It is one of the fundamental facts of the 20th century that Americans came to live in their cars. Thanks to cheap gas, a government subsidized highway system, and what seemed like growth without natural limits, the roadside became the face of “modern” America. Much of this has become part of the country’s romantic self-image. Big finned steel behemoths cruising small downtowns; throaty muscle cars roaring down stretches of two-lane tarmac in the boonies; drive through everything, from restaurants to coffee stands to banks to liquor stores. As the century ended, however, some of the gloss came off. Car culture always looked ahead, and thus never cared what it left behind it: neglected city centers, unwalkable suburbs, abandoned mom-and-pop retailers, and a cheap attitude of disposable mediocrity. In Approaching Nowhere (published by W. W. Norton in 2006), photographer Jeff Brouws turns his camera on this detritus, and shows us a lonely, haunting, melancholy world.

The book is first and foremost a photographer’s monograph. All the images are Brouws’, and tellingly at he end of the volume is a curriculum vitae — one wonders if this isn’t jumping the gun considering that Brouws is still very much alive and producing. The photos take up the over-whelming majority of the book, and are divided into three sections. The first, titled “The Highway Landscape”, primarily consists of images of roadside America. This section contains the bulk of the photographs in the book. The second is titled “The Franchised Landscape”, and concentrates on the corporatized strip-mall and drive through landscape. Lastly is “The Discarded Landscape”, concentrating primarily on urban decay. Following the photo sections are two essays, the first by noted writer William L. Fox, and the second by Brouws himself. Both Fox and Brouws write about the American landscape and how the development of “freeway culture” has effected it. Brouws includes a page of footnotes for his essay, and then the aforementioned c.v. and some acknowledgements.

With no preamble, introduction, or preface, the book launches right from the title pages and into the images. One of the most haunting for me is one of the first, Plate 11, Exit 66 off I-80, near Little America, Wyoming, 1995. To the left is a lonely and empty stretch of freeway, dimly lit by alien sodium-vapor streetlights in their sickly metallic orange pall. Above them glow green US-DOT highway signs, while in the distance beyond is a murky, snow-covered landscape of nothingness. It is the blue hour, after twilight, and the sky still glows faintly. The scene is bleak, remote, empty, and yet there is something majestic about it.

This brings up a troubling point. Skimming through the book, or skipping ahead to the essays, (which appear at the back, after one has been deluged in the imagery,) it becomes clear that this work is a critical one in nature. Brouws seems to be holding up to us a mirror, showing us the world we have made for ourselves. A theme of vacancy runs throughout. Many photographers try and find the scenes that make a location unique, the sense of place, but Brouws has done the opposite, photographing the things that make every American place the same. Yet critical tone or not, some images — like Plate 11 — are in spite of this moving and beautiful. Not for the first time this brings up the conundrum: how can an artist can apply arts meant to bring visual harmony and pleasure — composition — to a scene in which he or she finds folly? That Brouws shows us beauty as well as folly is either a signal that he also has been unable to reconcile this contradiction, or that he finds beauty even in the things that trouble him.

One thing that stands out in this body of work is the lack of people. Not for the first time, Brouws has shown an Hopperesque aversion to the human form. Of the over 100 images in the volume, only eight show signs of humanity in the frame. While Brouws clearly has a point he is trying to convey, is this fair? Sure, all art is biased, but I wonder if the work is slighting the landscape just a little bit by skin-flintingly erasing the human form from it. Who amongst us could love a world unpeopled? We see empty diners, empty sidewalks, empty streets. It should be no wonder that we find the scenes soulless and a little bit scary: we’re facing them alone.

The Hopper influence is especially strong with plates 127 and 137, the former of which much resembles Early Sunday Morning, and the latter of which seems to be recalling Approaching a City.

From the more technical side, Brouws likes to clip things off a lot. We see signs, cars, and (more rarely) body parts all clipped off and extended beyond the frame. He seems less interested in the place than the spaces between, often taking images of the voids than the forms that frame them. Most of the plates are richly colored, and when they aren’t, they are full of vast tonal ranges of subtle colors; although I am a big fan of black-and-white imagery, I can’t imagine any of these frames in monochrome. There’s a film noir influence too, with lots of murky, moody night images, with the edges of the picture disappearing into shadow and black.

The overriding sensation of the images in Approaching Nowhere is a sense of void, of nothingness. The decay and the bleakness has a certain beauty at times, but little of it is memorable. Even the most striking images — the night scenes — are forgotten once the book is closed. In their place is a sensation, rather than a visual, that sticks in the mind. It’s a kind of numbness. It is only then that it becomes evident: there is no single image that sums up Brouws’ work in Approaching Nowhere, because there is no single portrait of a place within the book. Rather, the entire book is one single portrait of a nowhere-land — the “nowhere” of the title.

The first of two essays in the back of the book is penned by William L. Fox. Fox gives us a brief and informative overview of the cultural geography of the book, as well as the photographic history of recording such landscapes.

Fox’s essay is followed by a longer one written by Brouws himself. Brouws writes with a knowledge and take on the landscape that places him more into the realm of social critic or urban planner pundit than photographer. He says little or nothing about the image making process, and a lot about his motives or vision. His essay is erudite and moving, although he occasionally slips too far into academia: Brouws may be one of the few writers I know to use the word “simulacrum” in a work meant for general readers. (It means, essentially, a front or a visual fake).

I can’t help but compare what Brouws writes here with David Plowden’s comments about his photography, and his awe of great machines or great bridges. With Brouws, however, there is little inspiration, little awe and wonder. Instead there is a drive to document a bitter reality. I am reminded, however, of Plowden’s reasons for quitting photography, his statement that the world he photographed is no longer there, and that this broke his heart. Perhaps Brouws’ bitter determination is but a reflection of this world.

The book is large and square format, so it will be a real pain to fit it on any normal bookshelf. It’s also just a tad uncomfortable to hold and flip through, making it more of a table book; this is disappointing, because my first instinct with these lonely images is to sit back and thimb through them in my lap, intimately. The upside of the size, however, is that you can truly get lost in the images, which for the most part are well reproduced. I do feel that some of the more subtle plates have a muddy look to them on closer inspection, but this is not to the point that it ruins the experience.

While I can’t state that the volume is a definitive portrait of America at the Millennium, it is without doubt a significant building block of work in the same vein as the photography of Robert Adams or even some of David Plowden’s grittier images, and a huge leap forward from Brouws’ previous books. Anyone who is serious about photographing the American landscape would be strongly advised to become familiar with this book.

Approaching Nowhere is available from Amazon as well as Powell’s Books.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy
Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy with text by Jeff Brouws. W. W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 12.1 x 10.9 x 1 in; hardbound; 224 pages, 323 duotone b/w photos, 1 illustration; $65.00

Sequels are always challenging projects to undertake. 2004 saw Jeff Brouws, erudite photography scholar and a photographer in his own right, bring us the definitive volume on the definitive railroad photographer, Richard Steinheimer. Brouws gave us a view of “Stein” through an academic’s lens; the result was a book that redefined railroad photography. Now in 2008, Brouws has brought us a new book in the same format and with the same approach: The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy. The question is, does it work this time?

The natural pace of sequels inevitably sets up comparisons between this book and the previous book on “Stein”. This may or may not be fair to Shaughnessy, as it seems to beg the question of “is Shaughnessy as good as Stein”? The comparison may be further heightened by the broad similarity between the titles as well: one wonders if Brouws could have found a title that didn’t mimic that of the Stein book.

A better question may be, is Shaughnessy’s work worth the same level of intellectual exploration as Steinheimer? Brouws certainly thinks so. He gives us a rather long essay (22 pages) about Shaughnessy, revealing to us his origins and vignettes of his development as a railroad photographer. Brouws attempts to take this further, with numerous side trips into the broader world of railroad photography. At one point, for example, he debates whether photographers such as Robert Frank or Walker Evans influenced railroad photography, but then notes that Shaughnessy was not influenced by them. Brouws also takes an extended textual detour to describe the “Milwaukee School”, a term he has coined to describe the prevailing 20th century railroad photography style as popularized by the iconic TRAINS Magazine. Yet even here the feeling is that of trying too hard: can one really lump photojournalists like Ted Benson and Richard Steinheimmer into the same stylistic camp as traditionalists such as Phil Hastings or gimmick-artists like O. Winston Link? The result is an introduction that feels overly long and unfocused, as if Brouws wanted to write a piece on the development of railroad photography itself, rather than a coherent narrative about Shaughnessy.

Following the introduction comes the bulk of the book, the photographs themselves. Most of the photographs are printed one to a page with white margins, and in fact only one image is printed full bleed. Unlike Brouws’ previous work on Steinheimer, all the plates are displayed against a white page. Few images are shown double truck, with a significant handful being presented across the gutter of the book and partway onto a second, mostly white page. Overall, most of the images laying across the gutter survive the experience.

The images that Brouws has selected greatly support portions of his “Milwaukee School” thesis from the introduction, being on average more conventional in nature and focusing more on documenting things and places over experiences. It is as if Brouws is holding up Shaugnessy as a pinnacle example of what was the mainstream railroad photography style of the 20th century. The book is also distinctively of its region: has Shaughnessy’s style absorbed what it means to be in New England and upstate New York, or do those of us who call ourselves railroad photographers simply associate the region so much with his photos that the two are no longer separable?

The most memorable photographs in The Call of Trains are the images containing the people who lived with and made the railroads. An elderly station agent, his head as “old and weary” as his employer, the New York, Ontario and Western. A Nickel Plate Road man, about to hoop up orders to an oncoming train. A Boston and Maine laborer washing the windows of a classic streamlined diesel locomotive in the mid-fifties. Best of all of these, perhaps, is Plate 16, an image taken in 1961 in Watervliet, New York. It is dark, and a switchman of the Delware and Hudson Railroad, electric lantern in one hand, is throwing a switch in a yard, his body lit up presumably by the headlights of his train. It is crisp, and one can almost feel the chill misty air; it is a scene of everyday railroading that is as real today as it was when it was shot. Interestingly, Lucius Beebe was so attracted to the image that he used it on a book about the SP, intentionally misidentifying the railroad and location of the shot.

Interspersed with these human-centered photos are bucolic panoramas, gritty scenes of fading New England industry, and dramatic night scenes. Strangely, though, I find that one of the least typical images of the collection is the finest, Plate 64. The photograph is uncharacteristically stark for a Shaughnessy piece, with a plain sky, minimal scenery, and an empty foreground. We look straight on the side of a train, a single diesel locomotive hauling a single car down the track in late 1980s rural New York state. Little traffic, no people visible, no industry or life; if plate 16 had a timeless quality to it, plate 64 was one of the few images I have ever seen to have captured so well how much the railroad world had changed.

Following the plates, we are treated to a two page essay by the photographer himself. Shaughnessy recounts for us a series of memories, including an intriguing one of assembling a story on a day in a life of a hostler on the D&H in 1957 that strangely was never published, and an amusing anecdote about a railfan tradition, fun with rental cars. The stories are charming, and if any fault could be had with them, it’s that there aren’t enough of them. After Shaughnessy’s too-brief afterward comes a series of extended captions for each of the plates in the book, and the final plate, plate 143.

Overall, the book that Brouws gives us is a valuable insight into a photographer who arguably represents the best of mainstream railroad photography from the last century. Although The Call of Trains could be faulted for over-ambition, the quality of both the content and the reproduction makes the book a standout. Anyone who is interested in the progress of railroad photography or who has an interest in the railroads of the New England region would be well served to purchase this book.

The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy will be released in November 2008, and will be available for purchase from Powell’s Books as well as from Amazon.com.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead