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The act of collecting was once a particularly strong trait in Anglo-American culture. Much of my childhood was spent in the 1980s, before the Internet era, when kids--and especially boys--were still expected to busy themselves with hobbies that generally involved some form of collecting. I never traded baseball cards--mine was a football household, poor benighted fans of the Seattle Seahawks--but there were other milieus: coins, stamps, agates. And then there were the adults. My grandfather, for example, seemed to be a magnet for early Pacific Northwest mountaineering memorabilia, though this was not his most unusual collection. That prize went to rocks. As in pure, genuine, plain rocks. If he travelled anywhere interesting--Mount Hood, the Olympic Mountains, Canada, the Oregon Coast--a humble rock would get tossed into the trunk. Jeff Brouws and Wendy Burton’s new book, Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs, is about the obsession of such collection, in this case of the amateur photographs of railroads. The railroad has had a profound influence on American culture, and is a subject of much veneration in popular history. The chase of The General across the battlefields of the U.S Civil War, the joining of the transcontinental railroad with a gold spike at Promontory, Utah in 1869, and the tragic 1900 death of locomotive engineer Casey Jones in a collision in Mississippi are all well known pieces of American folklore. More than a half century after the last mainline steam railroad laid low its coal fires and converted to economical, unromantic diesel power, the steam locomotive remains so evocative that it is the chief avatar of railroads in the public consciousness. Railroads help define the nation’s identity as much as do those apocryphal stories about Ben Franklin catching lightning in a jar or George Washington chopping down cherry trees. It should then come as no surprise that the American railroad--like the U.S. Civil War, or Route 66, or the All American Game of baseball--has a cult following, with its own genre of writing, photography, and art. For many years, Brouws and Burton have been chronicling the photographic output of this American rail enthusiast subculture, primarily concentrating on prolific and accomplished photographers whose work rose beyond the norm in technical and artistic merit. Yet even as this talented pair helped shepherd monographs of railroad photography’s “high art” achievements towards publication, Brouws found his interests were also being drawn towards photographs made for purposes other than artistic expression, and yet which sometimes bent towards visual lyricism in spite of themselves. These were, to misapply a bit of T. S. Elliot, “the useful presents,” workaday photos of railroad facilities made for assessing property and equipment value, or documentary images of accidents and wrecks, or sometimes random vacation snapshots. Hi mom, I’m at the Grand Canyon, and oh look, we saw a train by the motel! The bulk of the images that appealed to Brouws, however, were the images made by railway enthusiasts. These images typically placed the locomotive, with billowing steam and smoke, front and center, and were usually printed on small stock, often two-by three inches, about the size of a business card or--and the parallel should not be overlooked here--baseball cards. In the introduction to the book, Brouws describes the budding of this new obsession, at a 2002 visit to a railroad memorabilia swap meet in Springfield, Massachusetts. There, he wandered the aisles with “a crowd of wide-eyed rail buffs jammed into the space,” not quite knowing why he was there. Then came the fateful moment, when he happened upon stacks and stacks of photographs. Brouws “became hooked,” and soon began to sort through them looking for images that appealed to him the most. The images were largely anonymous, with few bearing a signature or photographer name, though more than one held an accidental poetry of data: “notations, inscribed on their versos in an elegant script, delineated the arcane language of locomotive wheel arrangements” or “concise histories of moribund railroads….” Best of all was a happy coincidence of counter-purpose taste and sheer volume. Most of the crowd at the show were model railroaders, and as such sought out images that showed the details of the subjects in the clearest lighting conditions. Brouws, however, was drawn towards the “artful” images in the mix, those with strong compositions, unusual moody atmospheres, or broader context. These images, while pleasing, made poor reference material, and so were in abundance among the stacks. Meanwhile the sheer quantity of such images made resulted in prices often shockingly low: five dollars, one dollar, many times even fifty cents! “In this age of online auctioning,” writes Brouws, “where every material object known to man… [is a] ‘collectable’--bringing with it the fact that nothing is cheap anymore…. it was a collector’s dream come true…..” So began ten years of image collecting. Brouws and Burton’s book represents the fruit, though not the cessation, of this collection. The volume, with its unusual squat format, fits in the hand like a hardback novel, inviting a fireside consultation in a fat, overstuffed chair. It is filled with a diverse range of imagery from the attics of America, a scrapbook of the everyday railroad, with a subtle and pensive layout and sequencing that is owed to the visual talents of Burton, who designed the book. Images like William Rittase’s bird’s eye view of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s yards in Philadelphia (plate 147) are mesmerizing, with a sea of boxcars and a gritty sky that looks like the work of a monochromatic alter ego of J. M. W.Turner. Other images show a kind of spontaneity that imparts life: the image of Southern Pacific Railroad employees riding atop boxcars in Los Angeles (plate 131), photographer unknown, is almost certainly a quick snapshot taken by a railroad tower operator out his window, a random slice of happenstance that speaks to us across the untold years. All of the photographs have an uncooked, unstudied honesty. How many of them have been passed by in all those railroad swap meets, discarded for their subtle blurs, their clipped off portions of equipment, their flaws that make them so delightful? While the bulk of the book may be a testament to the compulsion to collect such images, it also provides insight into the development of railroad photography, with a perspective that may never have been adequately addressed before. Brouws notes in his introduction that many of the enthusiast photos were distributed via clubs formed, in part, for that purpose, organizations such as the International Engine Picture Club, the National Railway Historical Society, and others. These were “analogous to contemporary social networking, with the United States Postal Service rather than the Internet acting as the delivery mechanism.” Today, railroad photography, as well as photography in general, is rapidly being redefined by Internet-based outlets and tools. Within the subculture, Railpictures.net has changed how the average railfan thinks of “publishing” and what to do with photographs once made, just as sites such as Flickr and 500px and mobile photo sharing tools like Instagram are completely changing how the general public uses photographs, as well as how we collectively define “good” photography.Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs offers a glimpse into another, earlier era of populism in photography, and shows the spectacular output as well as the sadly neglected present-day value of a truly massive body of photographic material. Pause and consider a moment: of the unnumbered bulk of amateur railroad photographs made over the first half of the 20th Century, the average image is easily found at a swap meet, with no record of its time, place, subject, or photographer, and offered for purchase at less than you can buy a cup of coffee. Or a candy bar. Or, really, less than you can buy anything anymore. Populism in photography exploded the amount of railroad material available to be seen, but it also resulted in poorly archived material and a general lack of social value. What parallels this may hold for our present, Instagram era of populist photography is a question worth pondering. With no regional focus and no narrowing of subject matter, Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs is ultimately art history, not railroad history. Among railroad enthusiasts, whose tastes bend notoriously towards the esoteric and the specific, I fear too many will pass the volume by. This would be a sad loss. Even taken merely as a book of general Americana and railroadiana, this volume stands out head and shoulders above the vapid output of mass-market picture book makers and in-house bookstore presses. More than that, for those who care about making images of railroads, its introduction is probably one of the greatest contributions to the history of railroad photography published in the last decade, and the images that support it are delightful, surprising, charming. Those who make acquaintance with this book will ultimately come to appreciate that charm. Those who don’t? They will pass by, sadly blind to these agates among the beach stones.

The railroad, and especially the steam locomotive, has been profound to the American culture. Especially in the Western regions of the U.S., where the railroad was integral to the development of modern civilization, the steam locomotive’s memory lives on in the collective imagination, despite the fact that the such machines ceased to be a meaningful force in the region’s economy more than half a century ago. Their endurance has something to do with their now foreign technological nature -- they are devices with their workings on the outside, crude yet elegant mechanical marvels that seem to breathe, seem to have a pulse, seem to be alive. Across the country, dozens upon dozens of steam locomotives survive in working order, cared for by loving and often unpaid crews, and run on numerous tourist and museum railroads. Many photo books on this subjects have been published -- the steam locomotive with its built-in special effects is a sort-of camera magnet, after all -- but few manage to rise beyond being overwrought photo albums. There is always something slightly treacly, slightly forced about these books, possibly because there is often something of the same nature in their subjects, a feeling of canned history. Yet somehow, Joel Jensen has created a work that surpasses these, a book that shows us preserved steam as merely a continuation of an unbroken tradition going back to the workaday, pre-digital world. In Steam: An Enduring Legacy, Jensen gives us not only a glimpse into a harder, grittier, sweatier side of preserved steam, but also a work of excellent photography that stands as an artistic achievement in its own right. The book is not a guidebook but an extended photographic journey through the survivors of the steam era. It begins with an essay by writer-photographer Scott Lothes, who provides a brief introduction to the cultural importance of the steam locomotive. The essay tells us the basics, but to anyone with knowledge of railroad history it will provide little new; clearly this is meant as a primer for the uninitiated, and it serves this job well. Following this, the bulk of the photographs appear in a gallery section. There is no set sequence, with the subjects bouncing back and forth through time and geography. Most of these images are displayed one-per-page, with healthy white margins at all sides. After the photograph section of the book is another essay, this time by John Gruber, founder and president of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. Gruber relates an overview of preservation and the steam locomotive, including some interesting tidbits about early, 19th century preservation movements and an able survey of contemporary efforts. He completes his essay with an overview of photography’s relationship with the preserved steam locomotive. An afterword penned by photographer Jeff Brouws follows, with an apt assessment of Jensen’s photographic style. A page of acknowledgements from Jensen complete the work. I am intimately familiar with the tourist and heritage railway world, and so, despite my respect for the photographer and the authors, I was not anticipating this book to be particularly impressive. Aiding me in this pre-judgement was my familiarity with other works on this subject, as described above. I could not, in the end, have been more wrong. This work is a success that it transcends subject matter interest, and would serve to appeal even to the least nostalgic of railroad enthusiasts, if only they can be convinced to pick it up and look through it past its opening pages. For these first few pages in, it is all billowing steam and dramatic light, and one might begin to fear that this will be yet one more album in the tradition of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, pleasant in a strawberry milkshake sort of way but not particularly memorable in its own right. It’s not that these dramatic images are bad: they are neither technically nor artistically flawed, but they are also of a genre that is not unfamiliar. But then, on page 22, it all changes in a characteristic Jensen fashion. The photo here, of two large steam locomotives and their long train of passenger cars silhoutted against a damp sky, is one of my favorites from this photographer, and I am disappointed at how small that the image runs in this book; nevertheless it breaks through the romantic bombast and begins a pattern of complex variety that marks this book as something special. Opposite this image is another fine stand-out, an image showing the roughshod nature of narrow gauge railroads, with a wandering pair of steel rails, barely any ties showing, splayed out through a ramshackle landscape, a tiny locomotive working hard to traverse the route. All darks and midtones, with barely a fleck of highlight anywhere, the image is teeth-gnashing and evocative. The human aspect of these survivors is not neglected, and may in fact be one of the volume’s chief strengths. The careful inclusion of crewmen and other workers is a key aspect of this book’s DNA. From trackworkers hammering in spikes, to groundlings passing hand signals, to roundhouse monkeys wrestling with the oversize parts of these steel behemoths, people are a subtle but integral part to the visual story Jensen lays out for us. Sometimes they are ghostly figures, caught at work amidst the steam, while at other times, such as with a Durango and Silverton crew shown in a photo on page 57, they are cocky, defensive, weary, and proud, staring straight at the camera for a portrait the likes of which is as old as the relationship between the steam locomotive and cameras. Other similarly successful images include a portrait of a crewman for the ATSF 3751 on page 81, a Mount Rainier Scenic engineer on page 124, and mechanical workers from the Durango on 134 and 159. In some cases, these people wear the clothes of railroaders and shop workers for a century, bibs and long-sleeved work shirts and hard steel-toed boots, but in others they sport plastic hard hats and, in the case of the last of these images, modern wrap-around sunglasses. Often, photographers of contemporary steam seek to exclude such modern details, to try and recreate some sense of what they think the past was like, favoring costumes and playacting. Jensen here rejects this, and comes out with material that is intensely modern yet intensely authentic in ways that those seeking the Colonial Williamsburg of steam railroading always fail to achieve. These men look like the railroaders of the past because they are the railroaders of the past, and things like modern sunglasses don’t break the effect because such little trappings cannot contradict authenticity. Failings? Few. One minor quibble is that the book is exclusively western material, but the book does not anywhere openly acknowledge this regional focus. This said, the book is subtitled as “the railroad photographs of Joel Jensen,” and Joel is a creature of the West, a photographer who is constantly roaming, constantly alone, and who sees the world through different eyes. And in the end, the artistic achievement of the photographer’s work makes complaints about his geographic biases seem trivial. Overall production values are high, as one would expect in a book from a leading publisher such as Norton. That said, there are a few minor quibbles. The paper seems a tad thinner than I am used to expecting in such a book, so that when darker images are followed by a large white space on the next page, a very faint ghost can be read through the paper. It is, however, barely perceptible, and did not significantly detract from my enjoyment of the book. As for the photos themselves, reproduction is generally of high quality. There are times when I expected more shadow detail, but this is a common failing of black-and-white reproduction in printed matter, and overall Norton has done a great job with this. My only significant quibble with reproduction is with some of the larger images displayed across the gutter; a few, such as the image of an ATSF steam engine passing behind a graveyard on pages 70 and 71, appear rather soft, as if the prints had been scanned and then displayed larger than their original size. This book at the end of the day is not at all about what it will be labelled as: it is not a photography book about tourist and heritage steam railroads. Instead, it is a book about undying tradition. No work has ever made contemporary steam more noble, more enviable, or harder work. The contradictions and anachronisms of these surviving steam locomotives and the crew that care for them are captured nakedly in Jensen’s photos, showing us something precious, something that is not at all playacting, but instead an unbroken thread to the relationship between man and steam that began on this continent in Antebellum times. This book will be of especial interest to those who appreciate steam locomotives, the interplay of railroads and geography, and the photography of railroads.

Although the Northwest boasts three major metropolitan regions -- Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland -- it is the small town that most defines the character of the region. With sparse populations, vast agricultural regions, and a legacy of resource based economics, the town (and sometimes, failed town) dots the landscape with regularity. In the post-industrial world, many of these towns have replaced their old ways of life with tourism, and few now would ever remember that a place such as Seaside, Oregon, for example, was once a timber town instead of a taffy town. Yet for every milltown turned tourist trap, there's a half dozen that remain truer to their heritages, and it is these more authentic and less famous towns of the Northwest that Foster Church has packed into his guidebook, Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest. Church intends the book as a true guidebook, as with the dozens and dozens seen in the travel or regional sections of our area bookstores. Unlike many of these contemporaries, however, Church's volume aims at something more akin to authenticity. Explicit in the beginning is the admonition to treat visiting small towns differently, as the author exhorts the virtues of visiting the local Chamber of Commerce, reading the local paper, and eating breakfast in the local diner as ways to learn the local culture. A requirement of any town he has included is the provision of lodging; Church argues that a town that seems at first sleepy and passed-by will reveal itself better to a traveller the next morning. Following a brief introduction in which the author lays out these arguments, the book is divided into five chapters, each corresponding to a specific region of the Northwest: the Willamette Valley, the Oregon Coast, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Washington. The bulk of Washington and the entirety of Idaho are excluded from the book, much less other states (or provinces) that have traditionally been described as Northwestern. This is perhaps understandable given that Church was a staff writer at the Portland Oregonian for over twenty years and is likely most familiar with Oregon towns or towns within a short drive of Portland, but the lack is noticeable and unfortunate, at a minimum bringing the choice of title into question. Within each chapter is an entry on a small town. In railroad fashion, the town name is followed by its elevation. Next comes a brief paragraph describing the road to the town; perhaps reflecting the author's interest in off-beat locations, all of the towns in the book but one (White Salmon, WA) are reachable only by road, although the presence of transit options is an unspoken likelihood. The bulk of the entry then consists of a short, generally narrative text describing a typical visit. The entry is then bookended by a single paragraph describing what Church terms "the basics" of lodging and dining. In all, 48 towns are covered. Following the entries is a brief epilogue and an index. The author has walked a very fine line with this book. Although organized and promoted as a guidebook, Church gives us more a collection of small narratives, like a journalist encyclopedia of place. The writing is solid, verging on poetic at times with an occasional turn of phrase flashing through like agates on a sandy beach. Read as narrative, the book can almost be frustrating, as you want to read more, to learn more, and instead are given a short paragraph on where and how to visit and then rushed off to the next entry. There is something vaster here, something that Church should seriously consider, the potential for a book that is equal parts John Berendt and Stewart Holbrook. Yet, is this sense of "not quite enough" exactly the point? In some ways, by leaving the reader wanting more, the reader is also left wanting to fill in the missing pieces themselves by visiting. In that, we can almost forgive the missed opportunities of a straight prose work. As a guidebook, however, the work is equally difficult to peg down. Church isn't going for comprehensive, but instead for the ways of visiting towns that he views as most authentic to place. In Mount Angel, for example, the bulk of the entry involves the experience of staying at the Benedictine Abbey in town. There's nothing wrong with this, except that it places the book more into the tradition of travel writing than of a guidebook. Further, there's a deeper issue revolving around the author's methodology of finding authentic rather than touristy small towns. His advice for knowing a small town partly relies on the same questionable mechanism as tourist towns do, like the visitor's center. Other staples of local place that Church advocates are the local diner's bulletin board or attending a local school sports function. There may have been a time when these suggestions would reveal a fully realized small town community, but if so it hasn't been in this reviewer's admittedly young life. The book is a standard trade paperback guidebook, well executed and business-like with an attractive color cover. It feels fine to flip through, and will likely not begin to fall apart until many years past it becoming obsolete. With no photographs and only a few maps, there's little to complain about. Overall, Discovering Main Street is a solid book with interesting stories and useful information for the traveller seeking something other than the usual over-advertised tourist traps. Although not a fully realized guidebook nor a true work of prose, Foster Church's writing is eloquent and occasionally beautiful in its own right, and the ways that he recommends visiting these towns are refreshing. The book will prove interesting to anyone who remembers the invaluable works of Thomas Friedman and is seeking a more contemporary offering.

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.

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.

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.

Portland has seen numerous shining towers rise in the past half-century. Beginning with Pietro Belluschi's stylish and ground-breaking Equitable (now Commonwealth) Building of 1948, it seems the architecture of the city's core has been written in steel and glass. And yet, for anyone who admires this city -- whether they be a kindly visitor or a passionate lover -- it is not these buildings that define it. True, they soar. Many are remarkable. Yet the vernacular alphabet of the city is made of richer things, of shining white tiles, cornices high in the breeze, and patterns of warm, handsome brick. The buildings date to the early twentieth century, when Portland was both at both the height and the end of its reign as the most important city of the region. In Phillip Niles' book, Beauty of the City: A. E. Doyle, Portland's Architect, we follow the life and career of one of the most important architects of that era. As Niles himself says, "he did more for Portland as it is today than any other architect before or since." Niles' book gives us a full biography of Doyle, from his roots as the son of a working-class builder to his rise as one of the most important architects of Portland. Doyle's career begins in the halls of the architects Whidden & Lewis, whose surviving buildings in the city most notably include CIty Hall. Here, young Doyle learned his trade through practical experience, ranging from drafting work to being the firm's go-for boy. Doyle was often sent to find particular builders for his employer, which in those days consisted of running from saloon to saloon until the desired contractor was located. Although architects were enjoying good business from the empire builders of the region's business and social elites, it was still more craft or trade than a profession, and Portland, for all its striving and grasping still had quite a rough edge to it. With rather improvised and gritty roots, both Portland and Doyle "grew up together", as Niles puts it. Doyle quickly rose to become the primary architect in the city. Major landmarks of modern Portland -- such as the Meier & Frank Building or the Galleria or the Benson Hotel or the American Bank Building -- all were designed and built over the course of the first quarter of the century. Just as Portland was rapidly acquiring its gracious downtown, so too was architecture acquiring its professional veneer. Trained as an office boy, by the time that Doyle's career was winding down at mid-century he was frequently and inaccurately described (in his own lifetime!) as having received a degree in architecture at Columbia University. It is telling that towards the end of his life he did little to correct this misunderstanding, and in some cases actually helped to give it life. Niles' biography of Doyle is more than a basic who-what-where formula. Contained in the narrative are many gems of the history of the city. One of the more amusing pictures that Niles paints relates to one o the first typists in Portland, whose talent was so exciting and new that she used to have an audience, noses pressed t the glass outside her window. The biographies of professionals such as architects often stand in great danger of being dry, yet Niles manages to avoid this pitfall for the most part. We are often given generous portions of context on the world about Doyle at any given time, and indeed the book is entertaining reading for this fact alone. The writing is clear and readable, although I sometimes feel that Niles has spent too much time on some aspects of Doyle's life. As an example, his two trips to Europe feel overly long. Although a more than enjoyable read, I also feel a lack of any personality from Doyle: at no point does it feel like Niles "gets under the skin" of the architect. I freely admit, however, that this is too much to ask given the nature of the author's sources and the span of time between the book and Doyle's lifetime. The book is softcover with inexpensive paper and straightforward production values, nesting within a slick and attractive cover. It feels nice to hold and thumb through, with just the right weight to make a long-term read flow. Supporting the text are numerous photos, primarily of buildings that Doyle designed. While these provide necessary additional information, they are rather small and basic in nature and I would have preferred more and larger images. Overall, Beauty of the City provides an entertaining and valuable record of the development of some of the most visually important structures of downtown Portland. In addition, its early chapters give a good feel for the Edwardian era city. Anyone interested in the regions architecture or in the development of Portland's downtown would find this book an enjoyable and valuable addition to their library.

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 landscape of the Pacific Northwest is an ever-changing one, and so it should be no surprise that artistic views on that landscape have also changed radically over time. By the close of the last century, Oregon, once labelled the "Pacific Wonderland" on the state's automobile license plates, had become a battlefield of ideas and ideals. Portland artist Michael Brophy has been trying to capture that essence of division and change over his career as a painter, with his most recent expression taking place in a series of large canvases all painted in 2007. Brophy calls this series Here There Nowhere, and it is the subject of a recent book by the same name produced by Oregon State University Press.

 The beginning of the book form of Here There Nowhere is heralded with an essay about the history of landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest, written by Jonathan Raban. The essay, titled Battleground of the Eye, may seem familiar to readers; it was adapted from the introduction Raban wrote for 2001's The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, printed by Sasquatch Books. Although this is not new material, it helps to ground the painting series into the wider context of the artistic representation of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The only error I noted was that the Northern Pacific that entered Tacoma in 1883 was not the creation of the legendary James J. Hill, but of industrialist Henry Villard; a minor esoteric quibble perhaps, but it would not have taken much to fact check the essay one more time.

 Following Raban's essay come the paintings themselves. Brophy delivers us images on a heroic scale, reminiscent of revolutionary art from South America or Russia during the last century. These are grand canvases with grand ideas. And yet, the content chosen to express those ideas is inherently anti-heroic, mundane, dull. Brophy likes repeating patterns and vast expanses of subtleties over the boldness of an up-front statement. It doesn't look like he's trying to be pretty. Darkened fields, broad skies, blank cliff faces; they are all empty landscapes, and rarely is a human figure seen. 

 It is perhaps the night images that stand out the most. Night Truck and Meadow both are evocative. The strongest of these is perhaps Crack of Dawn, a canvas with a deep wet cloud cover and a thin strip of dawn that any local will immediately recognize as the aggregate of countless mornings. Here we see how subtlety and muted color choices are key to understanding Brophy's take on the landscape. Not all the night images work in the book, however: Full Dark is a study in subtleties that sadly does not translate well to print at all. 

 There is also an odd disjointed feel to the series. Some of the images have a dark, painterly, brooding approach, like Blowdown or Aftermath; the palette of the former reminds me of something from Carl Hall. On the flipside are strong traditionalist images such as Ruin, which feels sentimental in nature, or Day, with a painterly realism of something very tangible, in this case the rear of a semi-tractor driving some two-lane road to nowhere in the vast inland Pacific Northwest. 

 If anything rescues the disjointedness, it is a common theme of nearly cinematic ideas; every time I flip through the images of the series I start feeling like I am looking at a storyboard for a movie about life in the forgotten flyover corners of the much over-hyped PNW paradise. What is amazing is that Brophy offers us a social commentary, a critique even, of how we view the world, and yet he does not choose the traditional route of painting scarred industrial landscapes or denuded forests or the like. Instead, he simply shows us that this is how we usually view the world, through mundane eyes that see only the same boring monotony. In a way, his critique runs deeper than the typical environmental or social commentary, pointing that the problem isn't the clear-cut or the junk-pile, but instead it is our viewpoint. It is internal, it is within us.

 Reproduction and presentation get fair marks. Brophy's paintings are all very large works, standing at 74 by 80 inches. To stand before one is to be dwarfed, even for a tall person, and any attempt to depict this series with any justice on paper must be admired for audacity if nothing else. I don't quite think that the publisher managed to pull this off; one square foot just can't give you the sense of scale that standing before the real thing can. Further, I feel that some of the subtlety of the originals has been lost in the reproduction.

 Following the images comes an essay by William L. Lang. Lang brings us back to the subject rather than the medium, concentrating not on Brophy's paintings so much as on the story they are a part of. He ably discusses the relationship of humanity to the land of the region, with occasional examples pulled from Brophy's work. Although a short and interesting read, I feel that Lang's comments are in some ways duplicative of Raban's text, while at the same time weaker and not relying enough on how an artist such as Brophy sees this world. What I wish had been included was a short piece by the artist himself, but such is not included in the book.

 Overall, Here There Nowhere is a slim but important volume that highlights how landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest is evolving. For artists or students of art in the region, it would make a valuable addition to the bookshelf.

A trip to the photography section of a well-stocked bookstore will yield shelves full of photographer's monographs. Countless spines arrest the eyes, each one vying to be the stylish work that convinces you that this photographer is the American Master. And then there is David Plowden. Plowden is one of the few living links between today and the greats of documentarian photography, the geniuses of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others who participated in the Farm Services Administration's photography project during the Great Depression. Their work, seminal to the documentary style, was paradoxically emotive, evoking a minimalistic visual poetry. Plowden -- who struck up a friendship with Evans in the late '50s -- built upon this tradition, mixing a lyric style of photography with a documentary sensibility. Over the course of his career, Plowden has published numerous books, almost always organized along topical lines: great lakes steam boats, great bridges of North America, vanishing small towns. He also has a fascination for railroads, the first love on which he lavished his camera -- indeed his first published photo was in TRAINS Magazine in 1954. This love expanded to encompass all manner of industrial subjects, from steamships and tugboats to steel mills and grain elevators. Now 76 years old, Plowden is at the end of his career, and it seems natural that he would publish a retrospective volume of his photography. Vanishing Point is that work. The book opens -- after two images and a table of contents-- with a forward by Richard Snow, formerly the editor of American Heritage. Here Snow ably pens a brief discussion of Plowden's career. The brush strokes are light, and those familiar with Plowden's work might criticize it as being repetitive or unnecessary, but it provides a valuable taste of the text and photos to follow, almost as if it were a kind of abstract of the remaining book. A gentle start: so far, so good. All this changes changes with the turn of the page and a remarkable 14-page introductory essay by Steve Edwards. Edwards brings his journalist sensibilities to the fore as he spins the story of the life and career of David Plowden. In so many ways, the story the journalist tells seems almost cinematic: a troubled childhood in New England, a youth amongst railroad men, a struggle to study a discipline he hated (economics) at Yale in hopes of making himself a better railroad employee following graduation. The reader is treated to the full transit of the photographer's disillusionment with the railroad world and with more common paths of life that would eventually bring him to photography. And here he works for Winston Link, studies under Minor White, and becomes fast friends with Walker Evans. Edward's portrait is deftly penned with a light touch and a sensitivity to emotions and motives that makes the reader feel they can get inside -- if only for a brief moment -- the heart and mind of the photographer. He is sympathetic, but candid too; Plowden's single-minded devotion to his art often came at the expense of a relationship with his children and eventually cost him his first marriage. The event is part of a repeating pattern of loss that seems endemic to Plowden's drive. Edwards relates a point in 1960, after Plowden had left the studio of Minor White, feeling he had made a great mistake to study photography. The scene is rural Maine, and the photographer is standing the the cab of a steam locomotive on the very last steam-powered run on the line. "'While that engine died, I sat in the cab in Brownsville Junction and watched the gauge drop to zero,' [Plowden] says. The loss was palpable; the very thing that had provided so much joy and escape during his troubled childhood had vanished." In the space of a few short sentences, Edwards gets to the burning core of Plowden's modus operandi. After this come the photographs themselves. Plowden was once scoffed at for being a "topical" photographer; here he wears this on his sleeve, dividing the book into seven thematic chapters of plates. Each is designated by only a roman numeral, with no title, no explanatory text, no attempt at interpretation. It is only the chapter divider, the plates, and in tiny text at the bottom, a plate number and very cursory caption. Although railroads were Plowden's first love, they are not the focus of the work, and indeed the images of railroads he presents here are not the strongest images in the book. The most amusing thing about these images is the first plate, a photo of a Great Northern steam-powered freight near Wilmar, Minnesota: it violates nearly every rule of railroad photography convention, with no light on the nose of the locomotive, a broad foreground space of snow and haphazard weeds, and a line of poles and wires directly in front of the engine! In addition to the train-centric images are more domestic moments, with the engines getting washed, maintained, and fueled by engine terminal crews. These images display a cinematic quality that is similar to Link, and indeed many of the plates date from 1959-1960, around the time of Plowden's association with that famous photographic dramatist. There is, however, one key element that is notably different; while Link resorted to everything short of building a personal hydrogen-powered sun to light his subjects with Hitchcockian precision, Plowden has worked only with available light. The result? His images seem fresher and more natural than Link's, as if the events in them had taken place but a few days ago, rather than decades hence. Far more stunning than the railroad plates are the nautical images, such as plate 31, "Tugboat Julia C. Moran Undocking Liner, Hudson River, New York City (1975)". We are on the forward deck of a Hudson tug, barely seeing more than a few inches of the con. Out forward is a single man -- one of the few humans that Plowden has included in his Hopperesque de-peopled world -- unwrapping one of the ropes that holds the liner to the tug. And behind hims soars the great silver rivet-speckled bow of the hull of an ocean liner, so massive that her decks and superstructure are lost somewhere in an Olympian height beyond the view of the camera. Bridges are, of course, one of David Plowden's greatest loves, and with boyish glee he gives us great hulking massive flying piles of steel. My favorite is probably one of the closest to me, an image of Newport, Oregon's Yaquina Bay Bridge shown in plate 61. The photo looks down the empty length of the span, and flanked between two gothic concrete spires curves the steel arch of the main bridge. The top nearly disappears into coastal fog, and the far end is barely even there at all. Beyond, there is no world, no ocean, no hills. Next comes a chapter on industrial subjects, lead by a large set of photographs of the steel making process. Giant metal buckets, glowing molten steel, flashing dancing sparks. After a tour of this mechanical Hades, Plowden takes us on a journey through a litany of "back end" jobs, a hidden world of industry and commerce that few get to see. We see the great ore docks. We meet the solitary men who work in the bellies of steamships. We walk among lunar piles of coal and of iron ore. We get lost amongst the clinical inhumanity of a nuclear power plant. The fifth chapter could be best described as wastelands. The images here are perhaps the most complex and most postmodern of the book. This America is one that is decaying, where every house hasn't been painted since FDR was president and each car looks like only Richard Roundtree would want to drive it, if it were still 1975 anyway. The bleakness, the desolation, the emptiness here is almost disturbing. Every now and then, I catch a sensation that reminds me of the empty highway-spaces of Jeff Brouws. There is a vague notion of social commentary emerging here, especially in the few plates here that show people; what is the future of the freckle-faced boy from rural West Virginia in plate 132? What kind of life awaits the girl staring out the window in plate 136? The state of paint and repair of her Pennsylvania home doesn't give much hope of stewardship for the world she is about to inherit. And in plate 143, shot in 1967, even the iconic form of the Statue of Liberty is framed by power poles and trash. Love re-enters the picture in chapter six. Here is rural America, and rural Americana: the small town main street, the general store, the hardware store. This is the world that is fast fleeting, a victim of a rural populace mystified at the decline of tradition and Main Street while they push their shopping carts down the aisles of Wal-Mart. The shop-keepers -- when they appear at all -- are old, their faces as cracked as the paint of their wooden floorboards. And now and then we get children, too, and an old couple in Iowa who keep a clapboard house with Swiss net curtains, and we get the silence of over-furnished empty front parlors from houses that were built when people knew what the heck the word "parlor" even meant. Storm clouds on the plains of New Mexico opens up the seventh and final chapter of Vanishing Point. It is the same image that is used on the dust jacket, a powerful, sweeping metaphor for the elegy that is the remainder of the book. From here out, there will be no more people, not a single solitary one. Indeed the only identifiable living creature is a single horse -- pale like that ridden by Death in the Four Horseman of the Book of Revelations. It stares out at us kindly from a single small square window in the side of a barn in plate 221. We are alone now, in the plains, navigating by grain elevators. We walk freely amongst barns and inside of feed mills. It seems that dust still hangs in the air, as if someone was just here, just working, but where have they gone? There is a profound solemnity, as if in church, and each successive image shows us less and tells us more. The final image -- plate 235 -- returns us back to where we and Plowden both began. It is a railroad track. Frost once wrote of two roads that diverged in a wood, one well taken, and one rarely so. Plowden, like the poet, took the one "less travelled by". Here, though, we see the mainline -- the path well worn -- and the diverging route merging towards a switch that unites them. Are we looking backwards from the diverging route of Plowden's life, to see what has gone now collectively behind us? Or are we looking ahead, and seeing that even the route less taken eventually winds to the same common end? Take care and note: there are no buildings. There are no people. There is not even a train. There is only a track that crests over a small rise and disappears, and beyond that, empty hills bearing no promises. It is an evocative image on which to end the collection of photographic plates, especially considering that the book is meant as a retrospective of an entire career. The closing text of the work is from Plowden himself, and his voice crackles with energy. Here he is full of humor and wit, buoyant in a way that is natural to those who have such a keen sense of loss and of the fleeting nature of time. Here we are imbued in a world of technical geekdom but told in such a loving fashion that, like the sometimes nonsensical phrasing of a T.S. Elliot poem, the reader is enthralled. He tells a hilarious narrative of his bad luck in camera choices, contraptions that seemed bent on being too bulky, too complicated, or too delicate to stand up to the demands he would place on them. The notes read like a letter from a favorite grandfather that you rarely see. It is perhaps the most valuable text in the book, and as precious as any of the photographic plates bound within the book's pages. This is a heavy book, weighing in at over five pounds. The binding is stout but never gets in the way of viewing the photographic plates, even in the middle of this thick volume. The paper is strong and bright and feels good under the hand. Reproduction on the photos is outstanding with fine tonal range. The design work on the book tends towards minimalist, with subtle tones, simple font choices, and bold charcoal-hued chapter dividers bearing stark roman numerals and nothing more. All the plates are produced in a nearly full-page format, with white margins neither distractingly thin nor drastically wide. Image grouping is carefully planned; where images face each other across pages (which is most of the time), the images act as a kind of diptych, reflecting some common graphic value or subject theme, while images that are strongest on their own are displayed solitary against a blank page. The book looks and feels like every penny of its $100 price. Vanishing Point is a monumental volume befitting the lifetime's work of one of America's greatest photographers. There is no question that this is one of the finest books I have had the pleasure of adding to my collection in years. It is a shame that some in the world of high art have derided Plowden as a "topical" artist. For every avant-guard photographer the art schools crank out, few will ever achieve the richness and depth of the American soul that David Plowden has. His work stands alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the literature of Mark Twain as essential to understanding the uniqueness of American culture. With an outstanding introduction, a collection of stunning plates, and a precious gem of an afterward from Plowden himself, Vanishing Point proves itself the definitive work of Plowden's life. No serious photographer of American culture should be without it. Photography books this fine are rarely printed en-masse; when this book finally sells out, it will likely begin to appreciate in price steadily. Buy it while it's new, before you have to pay twice as much for a used copy.

A visitor to Portland today might not realize that the city has a rich history in jazz. Fueled by the shipbuilding boom of World War Two, the city's black population grew rapidly throughout the 40's, creating a vibrant community on the east bank of the Willamette. This was a land of wild nightclubs, neighborhood bars, shady speakeasies that were open all night. Big names came to play, artists like Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, but the city also produced a number of local talents, like Wardell Gray and Doc Severinsen. It was not, however, to last; the construction of the Memorial Coliseum wiped out much of the jazz scene, and much of its history was lost. Dietsche's Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz sets out to record that lost history. Jumptown is by-and-large a narrative prose history. The story of the Portland jazz scene flows generally in a chronological line from the 1940s through to the 1980s, with each chapter focusing on a particular location that was key to the jazz of the time. The text relies heavily on direct research, consisting primarily of interviews with direct participants; many quotes and extended passages are included verbatim. Supporting this are numerous photos, many culled from those individuals. There are also reproductions of numerous LPs including recordings of local talents. This work contains a wealth of information on the history of Portland music and Portland's black neighborhoods. The book is not written for jazz neophytes however; many portions seem to be a stream of name-dropping, as if the book is a bop version of the Chronicles in the King James' Bible. Without this context, many passages will feel confusing or dense, and even with it, it seems to be more a who's who list than a story. The book does yield up some gems of local history, however, including the locations of most of the big clubs and some entertaining anecdotes in the words of witnesses and participants themselves. The book is printed in the dimensions of a typical hardbound book, but is in a softcover trade paperback binding. Paper weight is smooth and the photos are reproduced adequately. The back of the book contains a discography of Portland-related music that proves handy. Though a bit thin, the book is the only work I am aware of dedicated specifically to Portland jazz culture. Jazz lovers will no doubt understand the laundry list of names better than the average reader, and there is enough obscure history of the city that it will prove a worthy edition for Portland historians wishing for a truly broad library.

Penn Central. To this day, the name of this corporation sends shudders through the world of finance. When it went bankrupt in June of 1970, it was the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and it held that title for the next thirty-one years. (It took the collapse of Enron in 2001 to supplant it). In The Men Who Loved Trains, journalist Rush loving tells the story of how Penn Central came into being, but even more importantly how a few men picked up the pieces afterward and pulled the railroad industry out of a tailspin that might have proved fatal. Loving's work is essentially a journalistic book, rather than a scholarly one. It is written in a prose style and has an eminently readable pacing. Yet don't take this for being lightweight; that the author can weave such an unwieldy mess into a fast and cohesive narrative is a testament to his abilities as a writer. In ways, the book follows in the tradition of works such as Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. The story line follows the chronology of the demise of Penn Central, the struggle to pick up the pieces, and the creation, life, and eventual parting out of PC's successor, Conrail. Throughout the work we meet various key individuals; from the fiery Alfred Perlman to former CSX Transportation executive (and future Treasury Secretary) John Snow. Along the way, we come back again and again to John McClellan, tracking his career from entry level PC staffer through to planner for the Department of Transportation and eventually strategic advisory for Norfolk Southern. His career serves as a foil for the events of Conrail's life and death, humanizing a story of corporate battle and macro economics. And what a story it is! Following the collapse of PC, many pundits were predicting doom for the entire railroad industry. The more optimistic felt that the Northeast lived behind a wall in which railroad transportation simply would never pencil out. Although a government takeover of PC would help keep the trains running, many in the private sector feared it as a dangerous first step towards nationalization. In the end, a select few fought an uphill battle for the creation first of passenger carrier Amtrak, and then of the freight railroad what would come to be known as Conrail. Like Amtrak, Conrail has a belabored existence for much of its life. It inherited a property that was severely overextended and under-maintained. Only great gobs of public money could solve Conrail's problems, and even then there was no real guarantee it would turn the company around. Throughout its existence, philosophical and political opponents watched and salivated as they waited for the company to trip and fall. As Loving tells, however, Conrail endured, returning to black ink, and eventually becoming a publicly traded, private sector corporation. Loving tells, too, of the irony that was the end of Conrail; the company became the subject of a bidding war between NS and CSXT, and was finally split between them in 1997, redrawing the Northeastern railroad map along lines that were eerily similar to what Al Perlman had wanted before he was forced into agreeing with the PC merger. The book attempts to carry the story without bias, in the best journalistic fashion, and most of the time succeeds in doing so. There is, however, a distinct bias in favor of McClellan's employer, NS, and the between-the-lines feeling is that Loving and McClellan are friends. Still, Loving remains remarkable professional, remaining gentlemanly even when dealing with McClellan's arch-rival Snow. Conrail was arguably the nation's most controversial modern railroad project. The Men Who Loved Trains tells an important tale of railroading, corporate intrigue, and a thousand might-have-beens that make it one of the hallmark railroad history books about the late 20th century, of importance not just to scholars of Northeastern and Midwestern railroad history, but to anyone with an interest in railroads, the politics of transportation, or public policy.

Once upon a time, there were dozens of so-called "class one" railroads across the American continent, wielding massive political power and reshaping the nation. Today, most of those companies are gone, thanks to a corporate consolidation craze that began prior to World War One and continues today. In the 21st century American west, there are now only two major railroads: Union Pacific, and the BNSF Railway. Leaders Count is the "official" corporate history of BNSF, published under contract by them and distributed by Texas A&M University. The book divides into roughly three sections. The first deals with the history of the BN heritage companies through the 19th and early 20th centuries. The second portion deals with regulation, the forces leading up to the BN merger, and the early BN period. The last segment covers the BNSF railway, from formation through to the present. The book has a reputation of being a hard hitting self-examination of the company, it's successes, and it's mistakes. By-and-large, Kaufman does a decent job of telling the corporate history, but from the beginning there is an undercurrent of BNSF and its heritage roads being on the side of angels, and rival companies such as Union Pacific (UP) being less than stellar. While there is some truth to UP having a greater number of scandals in its past, BNSF's heritage companies were hardly innocent either, especially the Northern Pacific. Minor factual errors in the book make me question how much primary source research Kaufman actually did. Another example of his lack of deep research is his knee-jerk acceptance of conventional wisdom, especially regarding the demise of the Milwaukee's Pacific Extension. The segments dealing with regulation tend to be wonkish, but the segments regarding the creation of BNSF predecessor Burlington Northern are as good as anything I've seen in print on the subject yet. The newer portions of the book cover the creation of BNSF well, but tend to gloss over differences between BNSF previous leaders such as Rob Krebs and Gerald Grinstein. It's clear this is the sanitized version of BNSF, told from a board room perspective, and meant not to offend anyone still around. Kaufman closes his epilogue with text about BNSF today, sounding much like a company press release. While there's a lot of value to his final analysis of the future, you can't help but feel that it's not an unbiased view, despite his claim in the preface that the company had never exerted the slightest influence on what he wrote. Why was this book written? About half-way through, it occurred to me that the book in many was resembles a text-book; I wonder if the company uses it in their Management Training Program? Leaders Count is printed in trade-paperback form, the same rough dimensions most Bibles are published in. Indeed there are two versions: a plain cover versions issued in 2003 -- likely largely used internally by the company -- and a version sold to the public with a photo cover. One wonders if there is also a red letter edition. Leaders Count is certainly not unbiased, nor does it live up to its reputation as a truly critical self-examination of company policy and leadership issues. That said, the book is probably the most concise corporate history on BNSF and it's predecessors. For anyone who wants to have one, comprehensive history text on these companies, this is it, and with used BNSF issued copies in paperback for about $5 a pop, it's a steal. Just be prepared to read; this is no picture book and it's no pulp novel either.