Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: Photographs of William H. Rau [Hardcover]

John C. Van Horne (Editor), Eileen E. Drelick (Assistant)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2002

In the 1890s Philadelphia's preeminent photographer, William H. Rau, was commissioned to take more than 450 photographs along the routes of the Pennsylvania Railroad in order to promote travel on the railway to the general public. Known as "the standard railroad of the world," the PRR was the largest rail system in the East and linked metropolitan New York and Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and such industrial cities of the Midwest as Chicago and St. Louis.

Using a mammoth view camera that made 18-inch by 22-inch glass negatives, Rau produced a spectacular series of images for the railroad's promotional use. The remarkably detailed and texturally rich albumen prints, on deposit at The Library Company of Philadelphia, display a harmony between the railroad and the natural and industrial landscapes through which the line passed. The collection includes striking views not just of railcars, tracks, and stations but also of cities and towns, bridges, ferry boats, rivers, canals, factories, residences, and hotels, mostly in Pennsylvania, but with some views also of New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.

This oversize volume reproduces almost 100 of the photographs, carefully selected for their historical and artistic significance, as full-page quadtone images, capturing the impact of the originals as closely as possible. The photographs are arranged in geographical order along the various branches of the PRR, and each photograph is accompanied by a descriptive caption provided by PRR expert James J. D. Lynch, Jr. In the three essays that complement the photographs, Kenneth Finkel details Rau's career and early commercial photography, Mary Panzer places Rau and his PRR photographs in the context of the history of American landscape photography, and John R. Stilgoe discusses the advent of railroad advertising photography and its role in shaping perceptions of the American landscape.

Published in cooperation with The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

In the eighteen-nineties, William H. Rau, a leading Philadelphia photographer, turned an advertising assignment for the Pennsylvania Railroad into a major artistic project. Using a specially adapted railway car and two colossal cameras, he photographed everything from the mahogany interiors of luxury cars to freight yards, tunnels, and switch towers. His grandest effects are achieved in meticulously composed studies of the landscape traversed by the railroad—a panorama in the Allegheny Mountains, a log boom on the Susquehanna, the arches of Conestoga Bridge mirrored in the creek below—but in Rau's lens even the most ordinary railway junction becomes a Euclidean marvel of intertwining lines.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

"In the eighteen-nineties, William H. Rau, a leading Philadelphia photographer, turned an advertising assignment for the Pennsylvania Railroad into a major artistic project. Using a specially adapted railway car and two colossal cameras, he photographed everything from the mahogany interiors of luxury cars to freight yards, tunnels, and switch towers. His grandest effects are achieved in meticulously composed studies of the landscape traversed by the railroad. . . . In Rau's lens even the most ordinary railway junction becomes a Euclidean marvel of intertwining lines."—New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (March 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812236254
• ISBN-13: 978-0812236255
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 10.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,243,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rau's Look at the PRR, March 23, 2002

By 

Alan B. Buchan (Mt. Laurel, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: Photographs of William H. Rau (Hardcover)

William H Rau (1855-1920), one of Philadelphia's preeminent photographers, was commissioned by the PRR in 1890 to photograph hundreds of scenes along its lines in order to promote travel by the general public. This book contains 87 of his 463 original images, which are owned by American Premerier Underwriters, Inc., sucessor firm to the Penn Central and PRR railroads, and on deposit with The Library Company of Philadelphia.
John R. Stilgoe, Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard expresses in one of the book's three essays, "These photographs glisten with an energy born of opening, not the opening of pioneers opening the forest nor the opening of the first half-century of railroad technology, but the opening of wholly constructed, wholly controlled, scheduled and maintained, wholly artifical space."
Rau was a world class photographer and this is a fine selection of his PRR work. Therefore, it would be difficult to rate this book as anything other than first class.
These are excerpts from my complete review of this book, which will appear in a future edition of "The Keystone," the official quarterly publication of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society (PRRT&HS).

Alan B. Buchan
Member, Board of Directors - PRRT&HS