Tracking the Parallel Rise of Trains, Photography

Easy-to-use cameras and passenger train travel were born at the same time. Around the middle of the 19th century, these modern inventions compelled people to live a little faster and go a little farther than they used to.

Traveling three times the speed of horses and buggies, early steam-driven trains caused the distances between cities to shrink. Likewise, photographs brought faraway places into people’s homes. They also defied time. Moving faster than the eye, a camera’s shutter froze fleeting moments, allowing viewers to see the world in ways never before possible.

At the Getty Center, “Railroad Vision” explores the experiential links between photography and trains. Bringing together 90 photographs made between 1855 and 2000, it begins as a straightforward account of the mutually beneficial relationship that grew up between photographers and the railroad industry, at a time when the popularity (and profitability) of both were surging.

Photographers who were interested in up-to-the-minute technology and design were naturally drawn to the engineering marvels of trains, tracks, trestles and tunnels. Railroad companies in the United States and government agencies in the United Kingdom and France knew a good thing when they saw it. Many turned to cameramen to advertise their businesses and the services they provided, not least of which was tourism.

The first three of the exhibition’s four galleries outline the love affair between the lens and the railroad. A microcosm of the show as a whole, the first one features formal portraits of engines that have just rolled off the factory floor, their polished mechanisms glistening in the sun. The locomotives in these albumen prints by John Stuart, James Mudd and an unknown photographer are so pristine that they seem to be perfectly scaled toys.

More candid pictures follow, including A.J. Russell’s group portrait of passengers and employees gathered around an engine that has been decorated with an enormous elk’s antlers. Action-packed shots by Alfred A. Hart look as if they could be movie stills. Printed on card stock for stereographic viewing devices, they appear to have been made while the photographer clung to a smokestack or dangled from the roof of a tunnel.

Two train wrecks complete the display. In one, an engine tows a line of damaged locomotives back for repair or disposal. In another, a Chas. Minot engine lies upside down in a ditch, destroyed by the Confederate cavalry. The devastation is all the more shocking for its presence amid the excited optimism of the other images.

The next gallery focuses on the tracks that began to crisscross the United States and Europe. In general, American photographers depicted railways as just another element in a vast landscape. Alexander Gardner’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” mocks the pretensions of a series of Thomas Cole paintings. Those paintings celebrate the grandiose ideals of Manifest Destiny, while Gardner’s photos zero in on the dirt and tedium of laboring in the middle of nowhere.

By turns sublime and boring, threatening and thrilling, early train journeys were filled with ambivalent emotions and contradictory meanings. No photograph better captures the rationality and madness of linking the continent by rail than William Henry Jackson’s “‘The Loop’ near Georgetown, Colorado.” This bird’s-eye view of a track that snakes its way up several mountain valleys, eventually doubling back to make a gigantic loop, gives amazing form to the Sisyphean labor and boyish delight of building railroads. It also suggests that half the fun of going somewhere is getting there.

In contrast, the European photographers tend to zero in on single structures, treating bridges and buildings as sculptures that stand apart from their surroundings. Hippolyte-Auguste Collard’s image of a roundhouse’s sky-lighted interior makes the French railway system appear to be a giant Swiss watch, whose efficient beauty is endowed with religious transcendence. Edouard Baldus’ photo of a tidy station in Toulon celebrates balance, proportion and exquisite civility.

In a more adventuresome spirit, Juan Laurent and Louis-Emile Durandelle positioned their tripods between the rails. Their dead-on close-ups of steel bridges transform these geometric trestles into formal compositions that have the bold presence of Minimalist sculptures. Many other prints by unknown photographers depict bridges under construction, revealing an interest in nuts-and-bolts engineering.

The third gallery features the largest photographs, works by William Henry Jackson and William H. Rau, who both worked for the railroads. Jackson’s images of trains chugging through mountain passes and around precipitous ravines define the drama of tourism. They are just what you’d expect of first-rate promotional imagery: vividly detailed and downright unbelievable.

Rau’s photographs are also unbelievable, but for entirely different reasons. They portray vast stretches of Pennsylvania’s countryside, every square inch of which has been dug up, sorted and prepared for speedy shipping by the coal-mining industry. These handsomely composed and lovingly printed works are at odds with their blunt, ugly subjects.

In the fourth gallery, everything changes. All of its works date from the 20th century, when railroads no longer represented the cutting edge of transportation technology and photography had become an art.

In the previous galleries, all of the prints documented the visible world, recording what happened at a particular time and place. In contrast, the final gallery displays works of art, multilayered creations that serve diverse, more hard-to-define purposes.

One of the differences is material. Aside from a single etched photogravure (Alfred Stieglitz’s masterpiece “The Hand of Man”) and a pair of color prints (a hauntingly banal intersection by William Eggleston and a nostalgic interior by Jim Dow), all of the 20th century images are gelatin silver prints as opposed to those from the 19th century, which used egg--albumen--coated paper. Intense clarity and sensuousness characterize this medium, which allows for greater experimentation with contrasts, depth and texture.

Classic photographs by Walker Evans, Brassai, August Sander, Franz Roh and Edmund Teske hang alongside works by O. Winston Link, whose crowd-pleasing pictures of trains speeding by at night are at once hokey and surreal. In many of the images that fill the fourth gallery, people play an increasingly important role, displacing trains, tracks and trestles as the stars of the show.

“Railroad Vision,” Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, through June 23; parking $5, reservations required; closed Mondays; (310) 440-7300.