CLEVELAND, January 21 — Four photographs from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) archives are currently on display in an art and photography exhibit at the Carnegie Arts Center in Alliance, Neb.
The exhibition, sponsored by the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, is titled “It’s Work: 150 Years of Railroad Workers at Work.” The show runs from January 8-March 2.
The BLET photographs are by the late Richard J. Cook, former Director of Public Relations for the union, and were taken on September 26, 1983. They were originally published in the October 21, 1983, issue of “The Locomotive Engineer,” at the time the Brotherhood’s official monthly newspaper.
One of the photos on display in the exhibit, a 1983 photograph of Joel and Barbara Schafer, is on the Center’s Internet archive, railroadheritage.org. Joel retired July 1, 2006; she is working as a BNSF locomotive engineer. The images were made available courtesy of John Bentley of the BLET Public Relations Department in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Center exhibit is a part of “Railroad Art,” which includes paintings by Greg Garnett of Alliance. Mike and Medelice Wirtz are co-sponsoring “Railroad Art” with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Foundation at the Carnegie Center, located at 204 West 4th Street, Alliance.
Appropriately, the photographs are on display in a busy railroad community that serves the Powder River Basin coalmines. Alliance is the county seat for Box Butte County, which had 1,209 railroad employees in 2005, according to the Railroad Retirement Board.
For this exhibit, the center presents 38 photographs from across North America, beginning with a copy of a daguerreotype of the crew and locomotive Tioga, built for the Philadelphia & Columbia railroad in 1848. The images trace some of the changes in the railroad work environment, from the age of steam to the age of microchips. This exhibit highlights the human face of an industry that is dominated by machines and hardware. Technology has made the machines more powerful and the equipment more sophisticated, but behind technology are people who toil in an environment that is a world apart from most other industries. The exhibit had its origins in a three-year program, “Representations of Railroad Work,” funded by the North American Railway Foundation (NARF).
From its beginnings in 1997, the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, a nonprofit arts organized based in Madison, Wisc., has grown into a nationally recognized organization, the foremost group in America for promoting an understanding of the place of railroading in America’s visual culture. It is committed to preserving Railroad Heritage in all its facets, and works with photographers, writers, and historians across the country to interpret the intersection of railroads, art, and culture. While maintaining its focus on exhibits, publications, conferences, and a web site (www.railphoto-art.org), the Center has expanded to include an ambitious Internet archive, called railroadheritage.org, an initiative funded by the North American Railway Foundation and private gifts. Some of the Alliance photos also may be seen at railroadheritage.org. The Center is located at 1914 Monroe St., P.O. Box 259330, Madison, WI 53725-9330, phone 608-513-5291.