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A survey of images depicting railroads and images related to railroads from around the world
Tracks: Photography and the Railroad from the George Eastman House Collection covers more than 160 years of photographic and railroad history.
This exhibition is sure to please a variety of audiences including historians, lovers of the American West,
and train enthusiasts alike.
In a few decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century, two startling inventions changed human
understanding of space and time. The railroad made it possible for people to travel well beyond a day's walk
from the places of their births. The photograph permitted a kind of time travel that made detailed and
exact memory possible, even beyond the grave. In the United States, both the railroad and the photograph
were essential to the opening of the West and the development of national identity.
Even today, when the train is less and less important to most of us, its image retains the power to stir our
feelings and engage our thoughts. Even if you have never ridden a train, you know about trains, whether it be
through train watching, hearing the nearby whistle, placing pennies on the tracks, or playing with a model railroad.
In this set of pictures, the railroad appears as technological triumph, violator of nature, symbol, myth, and nostalgic
evocation of a better, nobler past. Tracks: Photography and the Railroad from the George Eastman House Collection includes works by Bisson Frères, William Henry
Jackson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Lewis W. Hine, Aaron Siskind, and others.
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William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942). APPROACHING HELL GATE, COL. [COLORADO] MIDLAND R.R. ca. 1885. Albumen print. Gift of Harvard University
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