Trains: A Photographer's Journey

Outerbridge, Graeme

ISBN 10: 0810944812 / ISBN 13: 9780810944817

Published by Harry N Abrams Inc, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 2000

About this Item

1st. ed. 2000 Hardcover with the dust jacket , unpaginated with full page color photo plates . Condition ; Fine / Fine. Size: 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.

Seller Inventory # 100106-R

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trains: A Photographer's Journey
• Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810944812
• ISBN 13: 9780810944817
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Author
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Photography / Art

About this title

Synopsis

A photograhic journey through the world of railways. For five years Graeme Outerbridge travelled the world by rail photographing everything that caught his eye - hulking engines, lonely and bustling stations, dark tunnels, high-speed expresses and the landscapes the trains traversed.

Review

The train may seem like the old-fashioned choice for today's long-haul travellers, on its way out as surely as the great cruise liners of yesteryear. But there's still something about a train journey that you'll never get on a plane, no matter how generous the legroom or how toothily hospitable the trolley-dolly. Bermudan photographer Graeme Outerbridge's local train company--the old Bermuda Railway--had already gone out of business five years before he was born but for young Outerbridge his stepfather's model trains remained magical. And thus was born the passion that led him to a five-year odyssey involving 40 train journeys (and two arrests) with his assistant Maria Dzgrynuk across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, from Nairobi to Nogales. Nice work if you can get it. But you won't begrudge Outerbridge the job when you see the photographs he brought back. They are, quite simply, stunning--telling their own evocative stories. Strikingly, the stories are incredibly diverse--despite the imperialist and capitalist urges that forced the railroads across the globe during the 19th century, each nation seems to have forged its own train culture. So here we have black steam billowing from a hardworking engine negotiating the scariest switchbacks on Devil's Nose in Ecuador; the hard-faced, unmistakable US Amtrak engine; hi-tech in Toronto; a street market dissolving in the path of a steam train in Milagro; the incredible achievement of the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone; the amazing opulence of the Al Andalus Express in Spain. Rest assured, Outerbridge is no trainspotter. Although loosely grouped under "Tracks", "Stations", "Power", "Travel", "Speed" and "From a Moving Train", the final pictures are less about trains and more about sights, like any good tourist. But some "special visions", he tells us, he let go: "it was enlightening not to hunt it down but to file it away in my mind." What a book they would make.--Alan Stewart