BAGDContext CSM

Here’s a photograph by Walker Evans. It shows a small railway station, out in the sticks.

Evans was a photographer associated with the Farm Security Administration. During the 1930s, the FSA documented the lives of ordinary Americans working in the agricultural sector.

I recently posted a cover design, with box-car, from the US business magazine, Fortune. Here are some more railway themed covers…

Fortune was a remarkable publication. It was expertly art-directed and always had great cover designs. Often, these designs were by modernist graphic designers…from America and Europe.

Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of railway images; these covers chart a progression from illustration through to graphic design, via commercial art and photography.

That’s the history of our discipline in one post!

I’ve been investigating track control systems for railways…there’s a logic of safety and performance that is compelling.

I found a terrific US based web-resource about the New York Central Railroad. The site describes the trains, yards, people and communities of the railroad through photographs.

Great stuff!

We were watching Michael Portillo’s continental railway adventure in the middle-east. There was a sequence filmed at the railway museum…including this tender, with lovely bold signage…including my initials.

The letters and numbers are beautifully painted and the right scale for the tender. They add a lot of drama to the machine. Imagine it, moving. Brilliant!

Here’s another great night-time colour transparency by Jack Deleno…

Here’s the biographical note from Deleno’s wiki entry…

Jack Deleno was born in the Ukraine. His parents moved their family to the USA in 1923. Betwen 1924 and 1932 he studied graphic arts, photography and music. After being awarded an art scholarship, he progressed to the Pennsylvania Institute of Fine Arts and studied illustration and music. Deleno was awarded a Carson Scholarship and travelled to Europe. The trip was an opportunity for Deleno to purchase a camera. Thereafter, he became increasingly interested in photography.

After graduating, Deleno suggested a photographic project to the Federal Art Programe – a study of boot-leg miners in Pennsylvania. Deleno sent some pictures to Roy Stryker, and applied for a job at the Farm Security Administration Photographic Programme (FSA). At the FSA, Deleno worked alongside Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans…In 1943, he moved to the Office of War Information.

The Library of Congress holds Deleno’s archive. This includes many terrific images of the US railways and its workers.

Click on the image, below; it’s panoramic…

Here are some colour images of the US railroads during 1943. The images show women doing mens’ work..and winning!

Chicago was the industrial centre of the USA for most of the 19C and 20C. It’s position made it the gate-way for the mid-west, and it was the railhead for freight and cattle. Accordingly, the city had enormous stock yards and rail yards for managing this traffic.

These pictures are by the railway photographer, Jack Deleno.

Here’s a cover design from Fortune magazine in 1939. Fortune was America’s most important industrial and business news magazine.

During the period 1930-1960 the magazine was a pioneer of new forms of graphic design that combined information and organisation…You get a clear sense of how significant the railroads were for the US economy from this illustration.

Here’s a terrific photographic image that I found online…it combines the horizontal of the box car with the verticals of the silo…I also have a weakness for the typographic detail.

This kind of industrial and poetic realism is associated, in the USA, with FDRs New Deal period and WW2. This was a time when the productive efforts of ordinary Americans were acknowledged as having made the crucial contribution to the war effort.