This scanned-from-hardcopy catalog provides a listing for an exhibition of Carson City, Nevada resident Steve VanDenburgh's photographs, as printed by Jeff Brouws and Wendy Burton(NY), and held at Glen Rowan House, Lake Forest College on Saturday, April 13, 2013. The showing took place during the three-day annual Photography Conference of the Center for Railroad and Photography and Art (Madison, WI, with archives at Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL). Mr. VanDenburgh also presented a program earlier that same day, a beautifully-produced slide lecture employing these historic 1950s images of his with recent (ca. 2005) photographs of the same locations in the Owens Valley and around the San Francisco area, showing the dramatic changes over the intervening half century.

Mr. VanDenburgh has generously donated most of this newly-printed collection of twenty-seven images, less a few that were sold at the confernce, to Special Collections, Lake Forest College library.  These join two previous, numerically smaller, sets printed by Jeff Brouws and Wendy Burto, of the work of Jim Shauhnessy and of Frank Barry. 

Mr. VanDenburgh, who grew up in California and has lived most of his life in western Nevada, has attended probably all of these annual conferences since 2003 in Lake Forest and one in Milwaukee (2005). 

Jeff Brouws, partnering with Wendy Burton, has been working to create sets of ten or more prints of choice, selected (best) images from railroad photographers' bodies of work and then reproducing these to the highest standards in giclee format and then matted. In the case of this show, twenty-seven images were printed, of which three or four only are not present in special collections. 

This addition marks a third photographer's work added to this series from the Brouws/Burton team and contributed to Special Collections of the Lake Forest College Donnelley and Lee Library. Together this group now of photographic archives constitutes a strong statement for an approach to preservation of railroad photography. This strategy emphasizes selecting the very best of a photographer's work and then lovingly, artfully and skillfully printing it in permanent format to ensure its longevity and its protection in an appropriate institutional repository.  These three eminent railroad photographers' work now forms a collection of collections that together demonstrate the effectiveness or viability of this selective approach.  

The railroad photography community is struggling to discover the means to preserve a generation of images mostly in negative and slide formats, the latter dominant from the 1940s to the the early 2000s.  This highly selective strategy articulated by Brouws and now demonstrated with these painstakingly produced examples (requiring about four hours of work), most notably this larger group of VanDenburgh historic images, presents an attractive and manageable alternative to endeavors to preserve intact whole collections.  

In some cases, too, as the Center has discovered, collection  scale, uneven quality or/and poor captioning and organzation and all of those together may render efforts to preserve, identify, and organize everything from a photographer's body of work impractical, or beyond reasonable resources.  While highly selective, each of these Brouws/Burton collections document in their own ways an important phase of the mid-century (mostly steam) railroading era.  As representative portfolios, they speak for the best documentary and creative work of the hundreds of worthy railroad photography pracitioners in the period.       

Brouws, Jeff

Burton, Wendy

Center for Railroad Photography & Art, Madison (Wisc.)