Another interesting pairing of books that arrived from the library at the same time. The Last Steam Railroad in America by O. Winston Link, which I ordered a week ago after making a post about him, and Burtynsky - China, by Edward Burtynsky, that the library bought at my request and I've been waiting for a couple of months for it to arrive. Together that make a pair of bookends; bookends at each end of the oil age. What started me on this train of thought was the O. Winston Link picture I posted last week:

O. Winston Link
"Sometimes the Electricity Fails, Vesuvius, Virginia"

What struck me was the juxtapostion of symbols of different eras. The 1952 Buick convertible is at the beginning of the postwar boom of consumption. The gas pump is from an earlier era. An era without electricity. The gas was hand pumped by the lever into the tank above. Then it is gravity fed into the gas tank. The coal fired steam engine in the background is also from another era. The end of one era meets the beginning of another.

The Last Steam Railroad in America
by O. Winston Link

I checked out this book because I loved the flash bulb night photography of O. Winston Link. This book had some of the photographs I knew but not all. It had something much more. One was text that covered how Link got into taking these pictures and a little of how he did it. He took these pictures to document a way of life that was vanishing. He didn't plan on doing much with theses pictures until many years later when there would be interest in the this past. Link was somewhat of a dinosaur himself. Photography was moving to 35mm and medium format at this time. Link was a large format commercial photographer, a dying breed. All these pictures, except for a few taken with his Rolleiflex, were taken with a 4x5 Graphic View:

Nice camera, even today. The most amazing pictures were the daytime pictures of the Virginia Creeper, a mixed freight and passenger train that wound it's way through the Virgina countryside, passing by subsistence farms and small towns, averaging 25mph. Many of the pictures are in color taken during the fall. The engines on this line, and the passenger cars, were 50 years old then. O. Wisnton Link captured a time warp. A world where people traveled using coal and steam from town to town, and not oil. O. Winston Link was was an anonymous commercial photographer who we would never of heard about but for this personal project that he took on. He wasn't just taking pictures of hardware but also of the people around this steam railroad. Truly amazing. I've added this one to my Amazon wish list as well as an earlier O. Winston Link book: Steam Steel and Stars.

Burtynsky - China
by Edward Burtynsky

From Amazon:

Edward Burtynsky's imagery explores the intricate link between industry and nature, combining the raw elements of mining, quarrying, shipping, oil production, and recycling into eloquent, highly expressive visions that find beauty and humanity in the most unlikely places. These images are metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence: we are drawn by desire--the desire to live well and in comfort--yet we all know that the world is suffering to meet those demands. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into uneasy contradiction and feeds the dialogue in Burtynsky's images between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. Burtysnky's latest body of work gives visual form to the industrial and urban transformation of China, a place where industrial forces are gathering on a scale that the world has never experienced before. If the earth's resources were up to now under siege through western colonialism and technological progress, then China is on the brink of a sweeping assault on the planet's ecosystem that is only just forming and is nowhere close to expressing its full impact.

Now we find ourselves at the end of the oil age and China is really gearing up to suck up what oil is left. Burtynsky's images are both beautiful and scary. O. Winston Link's subjects lived so much lighter on the land. His world was still 15 years away from a transcontinental highway system. Now we are using up oil and resources at a prodigous rate and the Chinese are working to out do us.

While the 1950s saw large format photography overcome by 35mm cameras, large format photography never went away and Burtynsky is one of the best of the modern users of this format.