The great triangle of the US rail system is Chicago to New Orleans, to Los Angeles, and back to Chicago.
The Sunset Limited runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles via Houston, El Paso and Tucson and Yuma…each name redolent of the old west.
Here’s a retro-style luggage label from the Sunset leg of that journey. With Monument Valley in the background. Terrific.
Not just a logo, a whole new system of organisation and presentation…
It’s surprising how few railway company logos are any good…just take a look. The old BR was clear and simple…and looked good in any size – as a badge on a coat, or on the side of a building…
This one’s the same.
Here is a map of the main railway routes of Europe in 1862. But, the thicker the line; the more people and goods it carries…So, not just a railway map; but a diagram of trade relations, economy, and association, across the continent.
This idea in graphic and information design was developed by the French engineer, CJ Minard.
You can see, straight away, that the UK has a much more evenly developed network of routes and carries much more railway traffic.
Here is a terrific railway poster by the Californian artist, Maurice Logan…it’s rendered in the flat-colour modernist style of the mid 20C. There’s a nod to the famous Terra Nova poster by Ludwig Hohlwein too…
Logan was a contemporary of Edward McKnight Kauffer…you can see the stylistic similarity between them with Kauffer’s designs for cotton-bale labels and in his posters for London Transport.
These are just the right kinds of image for mission style interiors of the US arts-and-crafts movement.
Here are two lovely pictures by the great American woman photographer, Lee Miller. The pictures are from a fashion shoot from the 1940s. The clothes have that New Look, look; which combines tailoring, comfort, and style.
One of the staples of the fashion shoot is to create an unexpected visual contrast, or surprise, between the woman, clothes and her surroundings…A railway platform is not, these days, an unexpected place to see a woman. But, in a culture where nice girls were routinely chaparoned, unaccompanied travel was considered slightly racy.
In these pictures, there is a great contrast between the pristine clothes and the dirty and sooty steam locos.
Here’s a lovely image of a steam locomotive…the picture is deceptively simple. It’s just black, white, and diagonals. The snow on the ground gives extra contrast against the machine. I especially like the figure, top right, for human interest.
The dynamic point-of-view, from above, is associated in photograpic history with the advent of lightweight, 35mm format cameras. Usually, the name Leica is attached to this kind of photography.
The cybernetic extension of the human body by small precision instruments had been a characteristic of the military experience of WW1. Soldiers had begun the war in more-or-less the same form as their Napoleonic predessesors…technical developments quickly trasformed them, as a matter of survival, into semi-mechanical warriors.
You can see where contemporary “transformer” robotics comes from…(first we make our tools, then our tools form us…)
In the 1920s, these cybernetic extensions became more benign. Camera and eye became combined to serve the demands of photo-journalism and documentary film.
If you want to see more of this, have a look at Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Or, the still photographs by Alexander Rodchenko.
Man with a Movie Camera was re-issued, by the British Film Institute, and with a new original musical soundtrack by the British composer, Michael Nyman. The dvd was presented in a tin with a Stenberg Brothers poster on it…I had to have that.
In Britain, the documentary film movement, of the 1930s and subsequently, extended Vertov’s ideas and achieved the proper co-ordination of iamge and sound…
First, in Nightmail (1936) and, then, in the work of Geoffrey Jones, especially Snow (1963).
It turns out that there are lots of films and pictures of steam locos in the snow…it’s the visual contrast and excitement of the trains against the landscape, and the emotional oppostition between hot and cold…Perfect.
