Mechanical Landscapes

Category: Black and White

  • #391 – Library of Congress Images – Switching (shunting) locomotive

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/npc2008011106/ This image was simply titled Bethlehem Steel in the Library of Congress archive, and had no supporting information other than it was published in the period 1910-1920. Interestingly, the engine has written Washington Terminal on the tender, which is confusing given the title of the picture. Wikipedia tells me that the Washington Terminal company…

  • #390 – Library of Congress Images – Mallett articulated locomotive

    Although articulated locomotives were a British innovation, and Beyer Peacock built over a thousand of them, only a few Beyer Garrets and narrow gauge Fairlie’s ever saw service in Britain. However, articulated locomotives were quite widely used in other areas of the world, especially where huge amounts of power were required without the loading gauge…

  • #389 – Library of Congress Images – Ironton Blast Furnace

    This photo is titled ‘Columbia Steel Company at Ironton, Utah a locomotive outside the blast furnace’. The Utahrails website gives an early history of the steelworks, but doesn’t explain its relatively short life of only 40 years. Despite the lack of established heavy industry in the area, Utah was home to deposits of iron ore,…

  • #384 – Next exhibition – Shadows of the North at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum UPDATED WITH NEW DATE

    I am pleased to announce that my next exhibition will open on Monday 22nd 16th February 2015 at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum in Helmshore, near Rossendale in Lancashire. Shadows of the North is a complement to my Mechanical Landscapes exhibition and focuses on the textile mills of the north of England. It will be slightly larger…

  • #382 – Library of Congress Images – Paddle Steamer Tashmoo

    If you’re slightly familiar with some of my blog posts from this year, you’ll have seen a number featuring the Lake Lucerne paddle steamers in Switzerland. So it felt like a good idea to look at what the Library of Congress archive held when it came to paddle steamers. Answer – hundreds. This is just one of…

  • #381 – Library of Congress Images – Really Big Machines

    While browsing the Library of Congress Historical American Engineering Record, I came across some photographs of something I had actually seen. A few years ago, I visited the Wyman Gordon Forge in Worcester, Massachusetts in an official capacity to see their (almost) unique 50000 ton press in action. For a piece of metal bashing machinery,…

  • #380 – Library of Congress Images – The Long Stairway, Pittsburgh

    The photographs of Jack Delano have been featured before on this blog, and these were the documentary images of and around the railway. This is a slightly different subject matter and style of photography. There are a few different variations of this scene on the Library of Congress website, but this one just works best…

  • #379 – Locomotive and a watertower at the Erie Railroad yards, Jersey City

    This was a bit of a one off in the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection on the Library of Congress website. It doesn’t appear to be part of a series and I can find no other railway photographs in the same collection. But it’s a good ‘un nonethless, even though it’s needed…

  • #378 – Library of Congress Images – Ocean Liners

    There’s something rather elegant in the design of the ships from the late Victorian / early Edwardian era. There’s something about the low set superstructures on top of the high hulls that made them look quite racy. This is the RMS Oceanic, the largest ship in the world at the time of it’s launch in 1899,…

  • #375 – Library of Congress Images – Building Liberty Ships at Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard

    Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. A shipyard with a crane. (sic) One of the biggest contributions America made to the war effort was its enormous industrial base and associated ingenuity. It was Henry Fords protege’s from the motor industry who were brought in to help the conversion of the peace time manufacturing industry to an incredible machine…

  • #374 – Library of Congress Images – Industrial Landscape Panorama

    This is a join up of two 8×10 glass negatives so as you can imagine the digital file is huge! Panoramas are (relatively) easy to produce digitally, especially when you have the right tripod head, a fast computer and the right software, but taking one using a large format camera and making darkroom prints must…

  • #373 – Library of congress images – Bingham copper mine

      Bingham Copper Mine, Utah. Carr Fork Canyon as seen from ‘G’ bridge. In the background can be seen a train with waste or over-burden material on its way to the dump.       Bingham Canyon, Utah. Ore train at a mine of the Utah Copper Company. Until recently Bingham Copper Mine was the largest open…

  • #372 – Library of Congress Images – Virginia coal trains

    Boy this was hard work! The negatives were as rough as the environment they portray and must have been developed in gravy and moonshine. Most of the Library of Congress scans that you may have seen in earlier posts have required a few minutes work in Lightroom to give them some contrast and a bit…

  • #371 – Library of Congress Images – Allied Railways (and British Engines) in Iran

    An American locomotive with an American soldier crew hauling freight to Russia somewhere in Iran. I was quite surprised to see world war 2 photographs of the Persian Corridor in the Library of Congress. This was the supply chain set up through Iran by the allies to supply Russia by road and rail. The motive…

  • #368 – Library of Congress Images – a trip on the Santa Fe in Black & White

    People talk about how in the digital age, there is a lot of ‘machine gunning’ of scenes with dozens of photographs taken, and not all with a great deal of care and attention. In looking through the photographs of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway it seems that the practice wasn’t unheard of in…

  • #367 – Library of Congress Images – Santa Fe in Black & White

    Going up? Or down? Wheel shop. Not sure what the significance of the white painted ones are – dummy ones for works use only? Or maybe ones that are waiting for machining / new tyres? This almost has a production line-like feel to it. The workshop is clearly quite large and by british standards quite modern. Interesting to…

  • #365 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Yard

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045480/PP/resource/   http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001024/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001028/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045487/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045474/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001046046/PP/resource/ Having explored inside the railway works, Jack Delano continued his documentation of the Chicago and North Western outside in the switching (shunting) yards. One tends to forget the enormous size of American steam locos until you see them with people next to them, and those depicted in these…

  • #364 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Workshops in Black & White

      http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001010167/PP/ Following on from the last post of the colour photographs of the Chicago and North Westerns workshops, this series are in a more familiar black and white. I say familiar due to the abundance of shed photographs taken in the 50’s and 60’s by British enthusiasts. However, these are different inasmuch as they…

  • #357 – Fletchers Paper Mill

    This one is another of those which I’ve had trouble processing in the past. For some reason, the combination of colours, as well as the light, is slightly odd and has always left me struggling a bit – I’m still not sure if I’ve cracked it yet. I don’t know whether increasing the contrast in the…

  • #358 – Old Lane Mill

    Sometimes images naturally lend themselves to high contrast, others don’t. In this I’ve shown what happens when you go too far. The starting monochrome conversion was inevitably quite flat, muddy looking even although given it was a grey overcast day on a muddy wasteland that’s to be expected. But overall, the scene just didn’t suit…

  • #353 – The Factory Photographs by David Lynch

    It’s a while since I’ve seen anything by David Lynch, but I remember that he had a very odd way of seeing the world. Best known for films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and the weird Twin Peaks, he’s also had a number of solo art and photography exhibitions. His most recent exhibition and accompanying…