Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad Hardcover - 2013

From the rear cover

"One way to approach Glenn Willumson's impressive book is to imagine yourself standing on the observation platform of a train speeding westward in 1868. Already disappearing from view are traditional ideas about the function of documentary photography, while at the other end of the train, precariously balanced on the cab of the locomotive, a photographer shoots pictures that show how successfully construction of the Transcontinental railroad is proceeding through the rugged western landscape. Willumson's thoughtful, carefully researched narrative works between these two views of railroad photography, explaining how the passive was gradually being supplanted by the active, but not quite so openly or aggressively as to suggest that the railroad's record of progress was any less authentic. Which tells us, once again, how effective such images were in selling the nineteenth-century West to the eastern half of the nation." -William Truettner, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum "One comes away from this text with deeper appreciation of the production of these railroad images and of their manipulation, indeed with a heightened appreciation of the richness of the photographic archive itself." -Kenneth Haltman, author of Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823

Media reviews

Citations

• Choice, 10/01/2013, Page 0