Laying Tracks and Tracking Change: An Interrogation of Nostalgia, National Identity, and the Railway in Contemporary Photography

Abstract

Abstract: From the time of the earliest photographs commissioned to document the construction of the railway, the camera and the train have enjoyed a mutually beneficial, almost symbiotic, relationship, and despite, or perhaps owing to, the parallel decline of both traditional forms in more recent decades, the two technologies remain remarkably intertwined. This project examines the work of two contemporary artists, Scott Conarroe and Mark Ruwedel, whose photographs depict the enduring presence of the railway industry throughout North America. Exploring the coeval development of photography and the railway and the contribution of both to the construction of national identity in the nineteenth century, I interrogate the two technologies’ shared relevance to questions of transportation, communication, and perception in the present, in order to explore how a nation or community is affected by infrastructure that remains from technologies that once were vital to its creation and unification. Providing a critique of the growing literature on nostalgia, I argue that ethical engagement, both within the present and in regards to the past, depends upon an acknowledgement of the heterotemporality of space and the heterogeneity of time.

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