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.

Denman Street and the West End is a prime example of a place where the focus is not on tourism as much as on the local, as evidenced by the presence of — tada! — that novelty, the grocery store, along with a post office and lots of small inexpensive restaurants. This is everyday Vancouver. And — perhaps this will come as no surprise — I enjoyed it far more than touristy Gastown or the shops of Granville Street. Keep Stanley Park, keep the Harbour Centre viewpoint, keep the Olympic Village. It is here at the West End (as well as places like the Chinese streets of Richmond) where the authentic Vancouver can be felt.

At Kintaro, in Vancouver, B.C.’s West End, ramen is served up from a genuine Japanese-style ramen shop.

Sitting in Kintaro — a ramen shop on Denman — I found heaven. The little shop’s kitchen is hopping with two young Japanese men, holding up the tradition of this culinary genre. Both staff and clientele are young, which bodes well for the future of the shop. Indeed, the formula must be paying off, as there are two more ramen shops within a block’s distance, and a third a bit beyond that.

Ramen, gyoza, Heaven.

The noodles came tasty, swimming in a rich miso-based broth, and accompanied by the prerequisite slice of pork, hard boiled egg, and a mix of vegetables. I also ordered a plate of gyoza, succulent and hot. This is the real comfort food, the way I like it, putting a smile on my face and made with genuine love for the art of its creation.

In Portland, Kintaro would be an ethnic restaurant, a culinary lark in a solidly intellectual, liberal, Caucasian American city. But here, in a metropolitan region where less than half the population speaks English as a first tongue, Kintaro is more akin to home cooking. And that is why, to me, this bowl of ramen is the real Vancouver.

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.

Recently, I visited the Vancouver, B.C. area. Among a number of goals, I had one that stood out: to sample the legendarily good Chinese food available in the suburb of Richmond.

Interacting with the culture of Richmond was an adventure of its own, especially if that adventure involves ordering something to eat. The first restaurant I tried was Top Shanghai. Although they had some English signs the predominate language spoken inside sounded like Cantonese. I immediately felt out of place, not so much for my skin, as for my lack of fitting into the social norm: every table in this place was built for eight or so, and here I was, a single patron looking for lunch. My awareness of being the only gwai low in the place did not disconcert me so much as it puzzled me: Richmond is the heart of Vancouver’s storied Asian food scene, but here I was, the only non-Asian enjoying it? What’s wrong with these people? I thought.

English is definitely not the predominate language in Richmond.

Perhaps the menus are to blame. Mine had almost no English on it, with several pages of purely Chinese characters and only a handful of items with English descriptions. I looked on the bright side: there was no way I had time, even if I spent all the rest of my stay at the restaurant, to sample everything on the menu, so this helped me to narrow my choices.

When I ordered the Shanghai Style Pork — they are a Shanghai style restaurant, so it made sense to try what they ought to be best at doing — the waitress seemed perplexed. She brought over an older woman who tried to explain something to me that seemed very important. Bones kept being mentioned, and I indicated that was fine, fine. Perhaps my nice shirt and tie made them think I didn’t want them? Or was she so used to the Caucasian obsession with personal health and fitness that the ordering of a bony, fatty cut of meat was surprising? For a split second, I considered that maybe I had just ordered a dish of marrow. No matter, this is an adventure, I thought to myself; try something new even if it was the wrong thing to order. I just nodded and encouraged them, and with one last check back — “They ribs. Pork ribs. Okay?” I confirmed my order and sat waiting, drinking tea and reviewing some of the day’s photos on the digital camera.

Top Shanghai’s Shanghai Style Pork.

Having cycled through the photos on the camera, my food arrived, a large pile of lustrous deep brown, short-cut spareribs that smelled luscious. As if my insistence on ordering them had made some sort of difference, I could feel the mood change in my servers. Suddenly, I was attended to often, albeit in a discrete and non-intrusive way. Did I need some rice? It appeared in a bowl shortly after. When my plate began to fill with bones, a new clean one quickly arrived unbidden. And the ribs? Moist, tender, succulent. Were they worth the trip all the way here for? I was not convinced that I couldn’t find some similarly good food at home if I looked hard enough, but at the same time, consider, my choice of restaurant had been a shot in the dark, as had my selection from the menu, and they had arrived delicious and without fault, not dull or oversalted or greasy in the least. The same could not be said of picking a random Chinese restaurant in Portland and picking a random menu item.

Although I had done what I had not planned to do — finish an entire plate of ribs — I still had enough room left to try one more place before heading back. My next stop was HML Seafood, located on the second floor of a newer building and offering Dim Sum until 3 o’clock. Inside, the atmosphere was a bit like a modern hotel ballroom, with rich carpet and upholstery, pinkish walls, and crystal chandeliers. There was no overwrought Suzy-Wong-dancing-with-a-dragon theme here. The dining room was relatively packed, with only a half dozen or so tables empty. I was amazed and impressed, however, to note that they had tables set up for two and four people as well as the prerequisite Chinese restaurant staple of the 8 person round. Plus, the smaller tables were not shoved into some corner by the restrooms, but in the thick of things where a good view of the dining room could be had. The staff here all dressed up in rather nicely cut suits bringing a very professional air, and they glided about the room in silent stately grace.

Alas, I did myself in here, deciding to be a little more experimental. My order: superior shrimp dumplings, custard bao, and — yes, I’ve seen Anthony Bourdain in Indonesia, and yes I ordered it anyway, or perhaps even because of that — baked durien pastries. The dumplings were excellent, although not necessarily unobtainable at home. The custard bao was unique, but a bit difficult to eat as anytime you bit into one a hot stream of orange custard would gush out. (Fortunately, none of it landed on my clothes.) The flavor was sweet — perhaps too sweet for me, but still interesting.

And the durien pastries? Well I bit into them skeptically, expecting the horror story of their smell to suddenly cause me to be caught in a foul yellow cloud of stench that would drive my fellow diners away. I was surprised, and maybe even a bit disappointed, but they simply weren’t that bad. There was no foul odor, and Bourdains’ description of a “stinky cheese” didn’t really come to mind. At the same time, there was a slightly off vegetal taste to them that didn’t encourage me to finish one, much less eat the other two. When the waiter came back with the check, he made a double take and stopped to ask if there was anything wrong with the pastries. I denied it, stating only that I could eat no more; I did not want him to offer to take them back and replace them with something else merely because I had made the mistake of ordering something I had not in the end liked.

The Canada Line makes for a quick trip to Richmond, earning it the nickname of the “Orient Express.”

Sadly, my list of things to do on my stay in Vancouver was long, and I didn’t get a chance to eat again in Richmond. The experience, however, was good, like a tantalizing appetizer. Without question, the new SkyTrain Canada Line had made exploring the area much easier, and I am looking forward to returning to the area on my next visit to try another couple of restaurants. Or three. Or more!

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.

I’ve rather provocatively titled this image “the future of Beaverton” with my tongue only partly in cheek. There are many ways that the pairing of Richmond/Vancouver does not hold as an analogy to Beaverton/Portland. Vancouver, for one, is a true international city, thanks to being the only major metropolis of its country’s (Canada) west coast, while Portland is more of a domestic city in the middle ranks of the United States.

That said, Beaverton — like Richmond — is a significant suburb of a larger city that is rapidly diversifying ethnically. Over the last decade, Beaverton has become the home to more and more small businesses catering to Japanese, Korean, and other Asian and Latin ethnic communities, a trend that shows no sign of slowing.

Beaverton, also, has ambitions, as evidenced by projects such as The Round, the recent proposals for mid and high rise towers on the old Westgate Theater property, and an attempt to secure a stadium for the soon homeless Portland Beavers AAA baseball team.

Rapid transit, high rise towers, acres of parking, strip malls of ethnic small businesses. This is the vision of Richmond, B.C. today. Might it also be the vision of Beaverton, Oregon in the next decade?

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.

Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington
By Martin Burwash. iUniverse, 1663 Liberty Drive, Bloomington, IN 47403; http://www.iuniverse.com/; 9 x 6 x 1.1 in; trade paperback; 480 pages, 15 maps; $29.95

In the late Winter of 1910, the largest avalanche disaster in the history of North America struck the tiny railroad town of Wellington, Washington, perched in the Cascade Range. One hundred people died, and the tragedy remains unsurpassed to this day. The cause, according to an inquest held later that year, was determined to be “vis major”, an act of God. Afterwards, the Great Northern Railway abolished the station name of Wellington from its timetable, hoping to eliminate the memory of the disaster from the minds of passengers on the line. The story, however, lived on, becoming a source of legend about the power and danger of the high Cascades. Photographer Martin Burwash is not the first person to write about these events of 1910 — guidebooks to the region often contain thumbnail accounts of the tragedy, while more recently Gary Krist dedicated an entire volume to it — but he may be the author who comes closest to bringing a reader to understand the experience. To do this, Burwash worked within the tradition of Jeff Shaara and Patrick O’Brien, and delivered to the world his life’s work, the historical novel Vis Major.

The book starts with a brief author’s note, discussing the actual event and noting that this novel is the author’s attempt to tell the story of the men who lived through or died in the snow slide. After this short note, the novel begins. The book is organized into a series of chapters, each following one character for the duration of the chapter. Overall it is an effective device, allowing the reader to gain an understanding of the events from multiple perspectives without sacrificing the human point-of-view. The subject matter — an obscure event in the insular context of a railroad from the often forgotten past — is in great danger of being difficult to access. Burwash largely succeeds in avoiding this problem, restraining from overuse of insider technical terms as well as staying away from lengthy esoteric descriptions. Instead, the author strikes a good balance of minimal terminology and the use of context to orient the reader.

The book has a lengthy narrative pace, and this seems to be a deliberate choice made by the author. Although we get only a few key days in the Fall of 1909, once the fateful storm of 1910 strikes the mountains, we follow nearly every move made by the men, day by day, step by step. Burwash has made many public comments about his dedication to doing justice to the men who endured and in some cases lost their lives in this tragic event, and it is no doubt this historian side of the author that is manifested in this narrative choice. Much of the events of the story were pieced together through research and the records of the inquest that took place in 1910. Although the dialogue in the novel is imagined, the movement and actions of the characters are as accurate as the author was able to piece together from the records, as stated in the author’s note at the book’s beginning. The result is generally positive. While the book feels too long both figuratively and literally — it weighs over a pound and a half! — the pace of the narrative is a bit like a horse galloping, and is difficult to resist.

Although Burwash’s first novel, Vis Major shows little signs of it. The biggest weakness of the novel is likely it’s length, as mentioned above. This said, the reader never feels their time is wasted, and the overall effect is to become accustomed to the characters. There are, perhaps, a few too many instances of Burwash trying to put us in the thoughts of the characters, (invariably indicated by italics,) thus using exposition when description might have proven more effective. This said, by placing us on the shoulders of the men (and women) of Wellington, the reader gets a highly sensory ride. We get to know the isolated community of Wellington, the passengers of two stranded passenger trains, and the workers of the Great Northern Railway. Most of all, we get to experience as if firsthand the valiant, frustrating, and ultimately futile battle of the rotary snowplows and their crews as they attempt to keep Wellington connected to the outside world. When the reader finally reaches the penultimate tragedy, the hairs will very nearly stand on the back of their neck.

Following the novel, Burwash provides an epilogue discussing what became of the main survivors, and then includes a list of the GN’s men who were caught in it, noting who lived, who were injured, and who died. Given that the novel is based around a true story, the book would have benefited from a slightly longer epilogue with a bit more detail. Finally, a brief statement of acknowledgements closes out the book.

The fit and finish of Vis Major is very professional. The book is quite hefty but it feels good to hold when reading. Cover stock and paper quality feel standard for a trade paperback, and the typesetting and layout is professional. Considering that iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher, this is far more than I would expect to see. The biggest question might be, is it worth the price? Even for such a hefty book, thirty dollars seems a bit steep. In the end, however, what you pay a premium for is not the physicality of the book, but the content. (Would Vis Major have seen print through traditional publishing houses? In these days of increasingly thin margins on published material, it is an unknown.) For me, the question was simple: it was worth an extra $5 or so to have a book with rare and interesting content and production values that felt professional. [Note: a hardbound version is also available. The paperback version was used for this review.]

Overall, Vis Major is an effective vehicle for telling the story of the Wellington disaster. Burwash’s passion for the human aspects of this story ring through in the text, in some cases making the novel feel more like creative nonfiction in the tradition of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. The book will prove of interest to readers of historical fiction, as well as those interested in the Great Northern Railway, the history of the North Cascades, or the futility of attempting to fight nature.

Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington is available from Amazon. [The hardbound version is available here.]

Well that took a bit longer than expected.

Liquidated is the second in my 99W Series of paintings. This is a planned sequence of images using the thread of old Pacific Highway West through Western Oregon as a common theme. The road forms a cross section of the western portion of the state, stretching from urban Portland through to the rural prairies of the Willamette Valley. This latest painting follows the earlier Morning Rush, Portland….

…Earlier by two years.

It is really amusing because Morning Rush, Portland I completed in January 2007, and immediately afterwards began Liquidated. My academic activities, however, quickly took over my time and attention. For the longest time, the painting sat clipped to an oversized Masonite clipboard, 2/3rds done. Every time I looked at it, I felt guilt, as if it were an abandoned child. There was never enough time. There was never enough motivation. Always my calendar had something else to do, some other thing that needed my attention. If the painting had been a garden it would have been growing dandelions.

Now that the 2008-2009 academic year has wound down, I’ve been playing catch up. There’s been lots of cleaning, straightening, book sorting — scarily enough there are over forty books I have collected over the year that have yet to be read — and all manner of other reprioritization that is now possible with the additional time on my hands. One of the activities that immediately rose to the top of the to-do list: complete Liquidated.

Monday saw me heading downtown on WES to supplement my disintegrating brush collection. Tuesday morning saw me cleaning out the paintbox, the old dried up palettes, the caked and dead tubes of paint. Tuesday night saw me marathoning until 1:30 in the morning, the smell of wet cotton paper in the air and my fingers stained with viridian green and Prussian blue.

Creating — be it writing, photography, or watercolors — is a vital part of me, but somewhere along the way of the last four years, I lost that. I came, somehow, to the conclusion that I had to set that part of me aside to get more important things done. The reality is, however, that that act of creating was what was important all along. The ground is familiar now, and it feels good.

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.

Opening up today’s Oregonian is quite an education sometimes. In today’s paper, staff writer Larry Bingham outlines an in and out list, of “how life in the Northwest is shaking out in lean times.” The title is “The Frill is Gone.”

And the list? The list of outs include microbrews, Powell’s Books, New Seasons Market, boutique coffee, the Portland Opera, Oregon wine, and heirloom tomatoes from the local farmer’s market. In? Pabst, the library, Grocery Outlet, Folgers, radio broadcasts, California 2-buck-chuck, and home grown tomatoes.

When I first read it, I was shocked at the stupidity behind it. Let’s step backwards for a bit of perspective. Yesterday, Moody’s down-rated the status of Macy’s bonds to junk status. Macy’s just happens to be one of the biggest advertisers that the Big O has. Without them, the paper would be in serious revenue trouble.

Now journalism isn’t about advertisement, (or at least it shouldn’t be,) but I would hardly call a puff piece on trends from the “How We Live” section journalism anyway. Given that, is it smart to be, in essence, insulting potential and actual advertisers in this way? Last I checked, New Seasons inserts their weekly sales ads into the Big O, and in fact they are a partner in one of the paper’s promotions on the back side of the very page this story appeared on. Ah, irony.

But this is more than just a matter of keeping advertisers happy. The economy is, indeed, in a dark, dark place. People are being laid off, and markets are shrinking. In this time of all times, our brewers, booksellers, grocers, farmers, and artists do not need to be listed on an “out” list. They do not need the region’s largest newspaper advising people that spending money on these things is a poor choice. To suggest that spending on these things is “out” is a cruel blow, is kicking these sectors while they are down.

For all of these reasons, the Oregonian in general, and Larry Bingham in particular owe an apology to everyone on that “out” list, from Apple at the top of the chain (iTunes was ruled as an “out”) to the smallest farmer at the local farmer’s market.

But it is an even deeper mistake than all of this.

Microbrews, books, good coffee, local and organic produce; these aren’t “frills”. Bingham writes that “some would even say good riddance to our age of excess.” These things are not excess. They are our culture. What Bingham proposes would be akin to asking the French to give up bread and wine, the Carolinas to give up Cheerwine and Q, or Wisconsin to give up grilled bratwurst and beer. And for the sake of what? Saving money? Yes, money is tighter now than it was, but to suggest that we would give up our culture for the sake of our wallets is preposterous and insulting. Mr. Bingham, you will have to pry the heirloom tomato from my cold dead hand.

I, for one, know the perfect protest. I am going to Powell’s this afternoon to buy a book.