Glenn Willumson’s Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad begins with a discussion of a photograph by Andrew Joseph Russell titled East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail (no. 227) (1869), also known as Meeting of the Rails, Promontory, Utah, 1869. The photograph features workers and executives from the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad celebrating the completion of the transcontinental line. Willumson starts by analyzing how Russell’s photograph is often reproduced as historical illustration, but its original context is rarely considered. To read the image as symbolic of technological superiority and the triumph of national reconciliation, as historians have tended to do, effaces the efforts of the photographer and the men he portrayed to direct a particular understanding of the event depicted. The photograph is emblematic of what Willumson writes is the distinct position of railroad photographs of this era: existing somewhere in the “middle ground” between historical document and metaphor, nineteenth-century railroad photographs are seemingly transparent, but also remarkably amenable to multiple narratives (4). Both positions can too easily overlook conditions of production, the original material conditions of images, authorial interests, and outlets of presentation and distribution.

Iron Muse’s focus is a period of intense construction by, and competition between, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific to complete the nation’s first transcontinental railroad line. During the late 1860s, the project finally began construction in earnest after years of debates about routes and financing, which frequently divided along sectional lines. These companies (particularly the Central Pacific) turned to photography to help monitor construction, secure financial capital, direct public opinion, and encourage emigration. The images would function as rejoinders to existing textual evidence and visual references that informed the popular understanding of the transcontinental railroad, its significance and potential. For example, in 1819, one of the first exploration parties ominously labeled the region between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains “The Great American Desert.” In 1855, a series of lithographic illustrations from another survey confirmed the existence of formidable geographic conditions. The popular story of the ill-fated Donner Party encouraged anxieties about future settlement in the Sierra Nevada region.

The response of railroad corporations provides an indication of lessons learned from the impact of media during the Civil War. A coordinated image-based multimedia effort could serve a range of ideological and instrumental uses. Moreover, the photograph’s status as object and image could be exploited to also serve those uses. Executives recognized the public perception of photographs as copies of reality with a potential to persuade through realistic detail and visual sensation; they also understood that photography was just one aspect of the expanded role of printed pictures in postbellum public life in the United States.

Unlike the many rail carriers that went bankrupt, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific survived; their vision for, and negotiation of, print-media formats no doubt supported their success. The original archives produced during the construction period included sets of stereographs and large-format photograph albums. After the railroad’s completion, these images became the basis for engravings in illustrated newspapers and travel guides. As subject matter, locomotives, railway trestles, and bridges had attracted American photographers and photographic studios since the 1850s, but Iron Muse specifically addresses corporate efforts to engage photographers, to craft a corporate image through photography, and to form and distribute a corporate photographic archive. Case studies of these corporations, which highlight their contribution to popular ideas about the American West and about the role of technology in modern life, distinguish Willumson’s book from previous scholarship on photography in the region, such as Weston Naef’s Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–1885 (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1975) and Martha Sandweiss’s Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). The four chapters of Iron Muse trace the arc of the life of these corporate photographic archives. The first chapter provides the historical context for the construction of the transcontinental railroad and the popular understanding of the project in the antebellum era. In chapter 2, Willumson outlines the production of individual photographers and their work for their respective companies. Chapter 3 presents an analysis of how company leadership responded to the images and their curatorial efforts to construct archives. The last chapter examines the work of the railroad corporations to influence the use of photographs, and their accompanying texts, in illustrated magazines and travel guides. Analysis of receipts, letters, negatives, payment vouchers, and correspondence supports Willumson’s characterization of the corporate archives as mutable multi-author productions whose meanings were actively managed through various techniques, and which changed as new social, economic, and political interests emerged.

Willumson argues that the photographers (specifically John Carbutt, Alfred Hart, and Andrew Joseph Russell in particular) were the primary respondents to this mission. A lack of biographical information, the commercial associations of the project, and scattered employment records are among the factors that have suppressed the role of the photographer in the critical studies of this period. Scholars have demonstrated the symbolic functions of the railroad as subject matter, but have devoted less attention to the photographers’ work in constructing that symbolism. Willumson’s explanation of the agency of the railroad photographers transforms them from passive employees to active artists and contributors. These men, he argues, recognized the unique experience of perception produced by combining their subject matter and medium.

Each of the major photographers in Willumson’s study adopted a singular aesthetic and representational approach. The author’s careful selection of images and interpretations of Hart’s work introduces readers to the photographer’s distinct understanding of the capacities of the stereographic format, conception of compositional space, and control over arrangement of subject matter. Using his subject as metaphor, Hart reinforced the idea of the railroad as the dominant force behind the social and economic progress of civilization in the second half of the nineteenth century. The discussion of Hart, the former landscape painter who worked for the Central Pacific, illustrates that photographers in the American West acknowledged other artistic conventions and yet created wholly new visual experiences. For other railroad photographers, the different experiences and working conditions in the West affected their pictorial interests. Russell, living among railroad workers for months, produced photographs that were particularly sensitive to the workers’ perspective.

Once the photographs were produced, Central Pacific and Union Pacific executives sought to retain the dual capacity of the photograph to convince emotionally and suggest didactically, while portraying their companies as competent and the project as nationally beneficial. Executives made calculated decisions to guide the viewer’s reading of the photograph as image and object, and Willumson presents an insightful parsing of the construction (mounting and titling) of individual photographic objects and photographic products (stereograph sets and albums). These artifacts demonstrate the struggle for authorial control over the object and image. However, Willumson’s discussion of the work of the Central Pacific executives is more revealing because of the nature of their arrangement with Hart and the existence of correspondence that reveals the corporation’s goals for, and opinions about, the images.

Part of the task of railroad officials in shaping photographic meaning was to identify and emphasize certain themes. For example, locations, which indicated progress along the route, were sometimes more important to highlight than the subject matter of individual images. Titles could be metaphoric, or they could borrow from the language of science in order to bolster the appearance of objectivity. These curatorial actions suggest the degree to which executives tried to direct the viewer’s physical interaction with the photographs as objects, anticipated viewer responses to certain photographic details and subjects within the images, and understood the variability of photographic meaning and the need to coerce meaning. Yet, readers also learn that the archives did not solely consist of photographs. Willumson mentions that the photographic material operated within the archive alongside other visual material, such as maps, but what is not fully articulated is how the photographic images interacted with those objects. Specific instances where the photographs functioned as a supplement to, or clarification for, other visual aspects of the archive would have enhanced his argument about photography as a rhetorical tool.

After the photographs were produced, companies sought to distribute them to national media outlets such as Harper’s Weekly, thereby extending their powers of persuasion. In an effort to inspire positive features and coverage, executives endeavored to work with writers and editors by providing material. But these platforms proved resistant. They had their own aesthetic, iconographic, and authorial ambitions, as well as audience expectations. Willumson’s analysis illustrates a contrast between the formal and material existence of the photograph and the informality and immateriality of the engraving based on the photograph. Engraving was a medium particularly inclined toward a visual rhetoric of sensationalism; the medium did not encourage the kind of visual lingering associated with the stereograph and photograph. Artists hired to work from photographs frequently embellished or cropped images. Editors and writers abandoned the careful sequencing and pacing of the viewer experience. Accompanying texts reflected the author’s views, which did not always match the corporation’s. Considering what happens to the image of the railroad corporation in these same publications over the next decades, Willumson’s exposure of these corporate maneuvers is even more significant. Whatever remnants of control railroad corporations had over their identity within this platform began to unravel. The horrific engravings of railroad accidents and violent strikes that claimed the front pages of these same periodicals were a powerful counter-narrative to the image of benign technological progress and corporations as the nation’s stewards.