[rail corridors]

obscured views of structures 4.11.11 (Piedmont Division)

Piedmont Division (Charlottesville – Washington), Norfolk Southern Railroad, Virginia

This project started in 2010 and involved photographing the landscape along Norfolk Southern’s Piedmont Division rail corridor through the windows of Amtrak passenger railcars while traveling between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, DC. I took hundreds of images over a period of five years, first using an iPhone 3G and later an iPhone 4. Though I did photograph technical elements within the railroad track environs, I was less interested in documenting railroad-specific technology. I was most interested in the landscape context of the railroad—the urban, rural, and agricultural aspects. I was particularly interested in capturing the fleeting views of the landscape as the train moved at various speeds. Given the performance of the iPhone 3G and 4 cameras and the speed of the train, the foreground was typically blurred and the middle- and background were more in focus, resulting in images that captured the essence of the typical traveler’s visual experience of viewing the landscape from a moving train. I was intensely concerned with documenting identifiable elements that defined or characterized the linear cultural landscape of the railroad.