BoingBoing recently sent me over to the site of LA-based photographer Dave Bullock and his stunning photos of contemporary industrial landscapes.
































"I find beauty in odd places. Chemical plants, factories, railroads, bridges and various forms of industrial structures have always fascinated me." - Dave Bullock

Me too. Maybe that stems from growing up, as I did, just outside Bridgeport, CT, one of those old northeastern industrial cities with plenty of views like this, albeit on a smaller scale, especially from the ribbons of highway that cut through and across them. Which is how we see them, much of the time. How many hundreds, thousands of trips have I taken down the 25-8 connector in my lifetime, turning up on to 95 northbound, over the bridge by the ferry dock and the UI plant and the East End, towards where the city melts into Stratford, by the tank farms and those gigantic old pylons over the parallel mainline? More often, we would take the split southbound towards Fairfield or New York, over and quickly beyond a zone of crumbling old factories and warehouses and sprawling projects.

There is beauty in all this, oft neglected as quickly as we hurry through and over it.

Bullock's concrete-edifice-in-raking-sun photos jibe with my growing fascination with industrial history and industrial archaelogy, with my academic and personal interest in the built environment as palimpsest. Along those lines, they also bring to mind the work of landscape historian John Stilgoe, whose books I went hurtling through over the summer.

Outside Lies Magic is a rather poetic, sometimes precious meditation on everyday places and structures in our American lives - shopping centers, town centers, highway motels, rights-of-way for gas and powerlines, while Metropolitan Corridor is a more academic exploration of the role that railroads played in way American space was organized between the end of the 19th century and the first couple decades of the 20th.

Some of the things that Stilgoe invokes in these earlier works (the Railway Post Offices sorting mail at speed, streamlined luxury trains blazing across the Plains, the aesthetics of the metropolitan corridor) also appear in his latest, Train Time. (You can hear an interview with Stilgoe on TT, from the radio program Living On Earth, right here). This time, instead of history or reverie it's in service of a thesis - one that's thrilling, important, improbable and infuriatingly incomplete. Stilgoe's back-to-the-future notion is that we're on the cusp of a new rail age based on the contours of the old one.

It's an interesting read, full of history and detail and "hmph" moments. Yet somehow, it's just a little less than the sum of its parts. I wanted it to cohere more than it did upon first reading. (I'm working through it again, in part for a review which you may see somewhere else shortly.) Stilgoe's bases much on the "fact" that ultra-rich, ultra-smart venture-investment types have been speculatively buying up land around old rights-of-way and rail centers, seeing the future shape of the nation in the traces of the less automotive society of the past.

Yet this evidence, as far as I could tell, is itself mostly hearsay and conjecture - in essence, "I've heard through the grapevine that old timetables are being bought up and studied by speculators...not to mention some of my earlier works..." Or as Stilgoe puts it explicitly, "along (the) tracks, events are unfolding rapidly, generally unnoticed except by rail experts and a cognoscenti attuned to imminent landscape and cultural change."

"Imminent landscape and cultural change." That's increasingly the stuff of my academic and personal interests (I haven't expounded much here, but I shall). It's about what we're going to do when the price of gas doesn't come back down, when enough people figure out it makes no sense to transport freight 1500 miles over the road, or to transport people 200 miles in the air.

While Stilgoe calls it "Train Time" ultimately it's not just about trains, or any one mode - the sudden leap in popularity of woefully neglected and mismanaged Amtrak, and the competing PR pushes of CSX and Norfolk Southern (can you go 15 minutes on CNN without seeing one or the other) notwithstanding. The environmental situation demands we start doing something about our spaces and places and networks, how we get to and fro and how we live. The political shifts offer the faintest glimmers of hope that we could if we really wanted to. But the economic crisis puts it all in doubt. Or does it offer an opportunity?

Speaking as someone who'll go home - a 300+ mile trip - this holiday without getting behind a wheel, who loves his car and uses it as little as possible, I want to believe Stilgoe is right, or at least (groan) on the right track.

Labels: Dave Bullock, John Stilgoe, railroads, Train Time