"Danbury, CT"

gelatin silver print

James Welling has been fascinated by railways since childhood, photographing train and railway landscapes stretching from his native New York City, through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Upstate New York, to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and finally Wyoming and California. Welling describes this series as his favourite work. His fascination with railways is probably inherited from his father and uncle, but Welling found the impetus for his Railroad Photographs series in a series of photographs in an old 1950 magazine by Walker Evans, featuring views from the train window Along the Right-of-Way, in Fortune magazine, 1950. Along with Dorothea Lange and other photographers of the FSA (Farm Security Administration), Walker Evans was one of the founders of documentary photography as an independent field of photography in the 1930s.
(Christoph Fuchs, 2021)

Artist talk on 23 April 2017 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (US) about the Railroad Photographs series in the context of the 19th century photographers: to the video