Synopses & Reviews
Jim Shaughnessy is a revered name among railroad photographers. This collection, the best of his work over a forty-year career, features 170 duotone photographs taken between 1946 and 1988, with an emphasis on the railroad culture of the fifties and sixties. Jeff Brouws--a railroad authority and photo historian--has contributed a biographical essay that traces Shaughnessy's beginnings photographing steam locomotives in his hometown of Troy, New York, to his documentation of the dramatic steam-to-diesel transition, with an emphasis on the northeastern United States and Canada, where the concentration of railroad action and often deep snow resulted in beautiful and unusual images. Not just a compendium of photographs of locomotives, this book covers the whole railroad world--the sheds, tunnels, viaducts, yard stations, and more. It is a wonderful document of what is arguably railroading's most compelling era.
Review
"Shaughnessy is an artist...capable of achieving a shining lineation reminiscent of fine-point engraving and of rendering roiling masses of steam and smoke as charged as a running dog in a futurist painting, of dignified stillness and enveloping motion. Appearing on full pages of this oversize volume, his pictures are engrossing, stunning masterpieces of photodocumentation." Ray Olson
Synopsis
Jim Shaughnessy is a revered name among railroad photographers. This collection, the best of his work over a 40-year career, features 170 duotone photographs taken between 1946 and 1988, with an emphasis on the railroad culture of the 1950s and 60s.
Synopsis
A majestic collection celebrating the life and work of one of the deans of railroad photography.
About the Author
Jeff Brouws is a fine art photographer and part-time writer who has nine books to his credit, authoring five on railroad photography alone. He has been published in Trains, the NRHS Bulletin and the R&LHS Quarterly. A book of his own photographs, Approaching Nowhere (also from W. W. Norton) was published in 2006. His photographs can be found in major institutional collections around the country including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Harvard's Fogg Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.