Torkel Korling, King Daniel Ganaway and Arthur Adolph Presler don’t have the same name recognition as O. Winston Link, the photographer famous worldwide for his powerful pictures of Norfolk & Western steam locomotives from 1955-1960.
Yet Korling, Ganaway and Presler, commercial photographers hired by the railroads, took photos of train engines that are just as meaningful as Link’s.
Korling snapped pictures of eight Chicago & North Western locomotives (also called “Zeppelins of the Rails”) in 1930 for a Central Bank and Trust Co. of Chicago, also known as the Dawes Bank advertisement. C&NW used that photo of eight large steam locomotives lined up at Clinton, Iowa, for years.
Ganaway, an African-American, is best known for his award-winning picture of the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited train arriving in Chicago in 1918. Presler’s the name behind a 1937 snapshot of five Illinois Central steam locomotives lined up at night with Congress Street in the background.
Railroad historian and writer John Gruber would like to make that even more well known. He and colleagues began the Center for Railroad Photography and Art in Madison, Wis., to preserve and exhibit the best of photos and other artwork (paintings and sketches) of trains past and present.
“Our initial energies are going into presentation, interpreting the impact and the importance for the cultural heritage of the nation,” he says. “While others are collecting, we are putting top priority on showing off the images whether from our collection or other collections.”
The group’s first major traveling exhibit, “Railroads and Photography: 150 Years of Great Images,” is at the Lisle Station Park through November (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). Though small, the collection contains the earliest known black and white railroad photograph, which documents the 1848 Tioga locomotive that ran on the Philadelphia & Columbia railroad in Pennsylvania. The most recent is a color shot of a Conrail train in 1998 by photographer Tim Doherty used to promote business.
“Railroads and photography started within a few years of each other; they sort of grew up and matured together,” says Gruber.
One of the earliest railroads, the Baltimore & Ohio, was founded in 1828 in Baltimore. By 1837, Louis Daguerre invented photographs produced on a silver or a silver-covered copper plate in a process named for him (the daguerreotype). The B&O took advantage of this new technology to record its new main line in 1831.
Photographers learned new techniques in the Civil War, which they used to document the growing West and railroad construction. The dry plate method of producing photos in 1880 allowed pictures to be made more quickly. But even before this, railroads hired photographers to inventory their locomotives. “They relied on photography to document construction and promote travel,” Gruber says.
Trains were the early subjects of stop-action photography beginning in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
“We don’t think about it much today; taking a picture of a moving train, it’s so simple. But at the time, it was an innovation,” says Gruber.
Other photo techniques also were tried first on railroads. Union Pacific pioneered outdoor color photography in 1929, using these new images to replace paintings in its ads. Photos generally were in black and white until the 1940s.
Chicago attracted numerous photographers working for the railroads.
“There was nothing like this in the world where you had a certain metropolis like a railhead where everybody in the whole continent had to come through,” says Arthur Miller, of the Donnelley Library at Lake Forest College, who is the center’s curator. “There’s nothing like it in Europe, nothing like it anywhere.”
So there was big business for Chicago photography firms. Kaufmann & Fabry counted more than a dozen railroads among its clients; Hedrich-Blessing, best known for architectural photography, at least three.
“So often people expect railroad images to be dull,” says Gruber. “I meant that while looking for railroad photographs, I have found an amazing array of creative images–many more than expected.”
Gruber was one of the last photographers who regularly took photos for railroads.
His photo essay of Chicago’s Union Station, published in August 1965, included a cathedral-like picture of nuns walking through the arches. Gruber also documented the last few weeks of Chicago’s North Shore Line before it folded in 1963.
“John himself straddles two worlds, the visual arts and railroad preservation,” says historian John P. Hankey, a consultant to the museum. “What is painful or difficult is that the railroad preservation world is very broad, very active, very deep in some areas, but it’s fairly unsophisticated and doesn’t get a lot of what John is trying to do.”
“A lot of what John collects is abstract or impressionistic. [Other collectors] don’t see the value in that,” said Mark Hemphill, editor of Trains Magazine based in Waukesha, Wis. “He’s not just collecting photographs of railroads. He’s looking for meaning, a deeper understanding. He’s preserving the meaningful photographs. Rarity is not the criteria, meaning is, which very few bring to preservation.”
Gruber added: “We are looking for high-quality photographs, representative of time periods and styles of photography. We want to display the work of significant, creative photographers. First and foremost, the Center’s focus is on presentation–presentation of high-quality, visually exciting images.”
Gruber never lost his love of photographing locomotives even in the 1960s, when passenger rail was being consolidated into Amtrak by 1971.
While Gruber continued to take photographs, he began to collect railroad photos. In 1997, he founded the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. He travels the country, searching archives to find out about the photographers who made the trains famous.
“Since the background usually influences a person’s photography, I try to find out as much biographical information as possible,” Gruber says.
He’s researching New Yorker Frank W. Blauvelt, who took some of those early “action” shots. Gruber bought some of Blauvelt’s work on eBay, and he has contacted his daughter in California.
Ditto for Ganaway. The Center has only published examples of Ganaway’s work. “We don’t have actual prints. Along the way at some key point someone didn’t save his work,” says Miller. “We want to avoid future Ganaways.”
But the Center does have more than 5,000 original photographs donated by Chicago architect Arthur Dubin, who had a passion for trains. He took interior shots of trains and locomotives from the 1940s through the late 1960s.
“He looked at it with a designer’s eye, but there’s a lot of photography of people: Pullman porters, brakemen and celebrities. It’s a lot more diverse body of work than people might expect, including African-Americans and women,” says Miller.
Dubin also saved Pullman records in the 1960s, when original glass-plate negatives were being tossed out company windows. Some of those are in the Smithsonian Institution.
“There’s a dimension of railroad art that includes lost art because some railroads are gone,” says Miller.
While there’s talk of future exhibits, the center largely exists as a Web site (www.railphoto-art.org), with archives at Lake Forest College and a quarterly publication, Railroad Heritage.
“John can’t do the work by himself,” says David Kahler, one of the center’s directors. “We have to figure out a resource plan. Do we rent space? Hire a small staff to catalog material? Hire someone like John to write? We do need assistance. We need a larger financial base. We’re in the process of working on that.”
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“Railroads and Photography: 150 Years of Great Images,” is at the Lisle Station Park, 921 School St., Lisle, through November (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). Hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays or by appointment. Call 630-968-0499.
