Led by Brian Sholis. Learn the full story of the visionary engineering tunnel projects that rerouted traffic and reshaped New York's cityscape.
Photography was a new invention in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and as a technology it grew up alongside railroads—especially in America, where the first accurate representations of a given place were often made by photographers working on behalf of railroad expansion. Surveys of this vast, largely uncharted territory were commissioned by the government and by the railroad companies themselves, and sent photographers like A.J. Russell, Timothy O'Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson out into the field. Their images, widely distributed through government documents, news-media reproductions, and tourist publications, played an especially important role in refashioning the imagined American landscape.
This exhibition includes a small selection of such materials, encompassing railroad maps, lithographs taken from illustrated magazines, other prints, and turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo-postcards. From them, one can discover how quickly fresh observation gave way to visual convention.
Featuring work by: Jeff Brouws, Justine Kurland, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, and James Welling.
Shown: Mark Ruwedel, "San Diego and Arizona Eastern #7,"
2003. From the series "Westward the Course of
Empire." Gelatin silver print.
New York City, NY; NYC