LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- Railroad Vision, on view through June 23, 2002 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, presents more than 80 rare photographs from the 1850s onward exploring the side-by-side progress of railroads and photography. The two inventions developed almost simultaneously in the 1830s, each affecting the other. More than a historical survey, Railroad Vision celebrates how photographs captured the romantic vision of railroads as the symbol of industrial development, expanding nations, a suddenly accessible world, and a changing society. From Édouard Baldus' images of the new French lines in the 1860s to O. Winston Link's nighttime views of the last steam-powered trains in 1950s America, the exhibition illustrates the profound impact that railroads and photography had on perceptions of space, time, distance, and travel.

The exhibition features early stereographs, travel books, and rare photographs of early locomotive steam engines, depots, wooden and iron bridges, Civil War train wrecks, and newly laid lines in the European and American countryside. Master works on display include photographs by Gustave Le Gray from the 1850s; Hippolyte-Auguste Collard and A. J. Russell from the 1860s; William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins from the 1870s; William H. Rau from the 1890s; Charles Sheeler and Alfred Stieglitz from the early 1900s; O. Winston Link and Edmund Teske from the mid 1900s; and William Eggleston and Jim Dow from the late 1900s.



Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, comments, "More than any other inventions of this period, railroads and photography dramatically shortened the time required to travel from one place to another, and the time between the idea for a picture and its realization. This exhibition highlights many never-before published or exhibited rare photographs from the Getty's collection."



Anne Lyden, assistant curator in charge of the exhibition said, "Photographs profoundly illustrate the impact of railroads on nature and society and demonstrate how photography visually defined the modern world."