There are two passions from my childhood that hold over into my art. One is model trains and the other, more obvious one, photography. In fact I got back into photography after many years because of model railroading.
We had moved to a new house, my son was at the right age so I started a new train layout. I wanted to document the process so I dove into digital photograph after years using film.
I like to model the past. Specifically the 1930-40s era when steam trains were still a part of the landscape and the post war boom years were off in the distance. When life was simplier and a bit grittier. Urban renewal wasn’t a thing and people didn’t mind so much if things looked a bit messy. Besides after living through a depression one learned to hand on to that old car or old washing machine just in case you needed it.
One of my photographer heroes is Walker Evans who photographed and documented this era. His work is a rich source of reference material for modeling this time in America. Just look at all the juice detail in this photograph of a roadside stand in Alabama. All that detail to model and those beautiful hand painted signs.
Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés (1971.646.35), advertisements (1987.1100.59), simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making. – https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
Walker Evans Inspired Photographs
Many of my photographs fall into the documentary style of Walker Evans and I’m attracted to the vernacular. Luckily I live in rural New Hampshire where a lot of the past remains. Lack of economic pressure, a slow pace of development and a community that enjoys preserving history keeps at lot of this area looking the same as it did year ago.
