Faces of Chicago’s Railroad Community: Photos by Jack Delano
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Of the multitude of subjects captured on film by the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information’s remarkable team of photographers in the 1930s and 1940s, none illuminates the lives of those who worked in America’s heavy industries more than Jack Delano’s story of the nation’s railroads, especially his coverage of Chicago. FSA-OWI’s assignment for Delano was twofold: describe an American industry critical to the war effort and create homefront enthusiasm for fighting the war.
The existence of Delano’s 2,000-plus photographs in the FSA-OWI collection at the Library of Congress is hardly a secret. They were used in 1977 in James E. Valle’s The Iron Horse at War, a book that emphasized locomotives and operations. The Center’s project builds on his pioneering effort, and will tell the railroad story through the lives of Delano’s subjects--a human-interest social-historical approach. Examples are on railroadheritage.org.
Our goal is to prepare an exhibition of 60 pictures that distill Delano's Chicago coverage. Each will feature a person in the workplace. Each will be captioned to tell the subject's personal stories and railroad stories. We anticipate accompanying programs and a catalog. We hope to open the doors in 2012, and we are considering similar Delano shows across the country in other cities where he worked.
Delano (1914-97) appears to have had a gift, tempered by luck, for selecting portrait subjects who reflect America’s and Chicago’s variety of ethnic groups and social classes. He recorded their names as well as their faces, making it possible to locate the workers’ surviving families and to use their portraits as a gateway for telling the families’ highly varied histories—and, by extension, the social history of America in general—for the era of the early 1940s to the present. For example, one of his subjects was an African American who organized a tenant farmer’s group in Arkansas. A grandson of another, an Italian-American conductor, is a television celebrity who keeps his grandfather’s railroad watch under glass on his mantel. In sum, in only two years (1942-43) Delano created perhaps the best overall portrait of railroading and its people and culture of any photographer in the United States. (Indeed, the volume of photographs may constitute the largest such project in the world.)
Our project, “Faces of Chicago’s Railroad Community: Photographs by Jack Delano,” will demonstrate that the railroad industry—like ethnic, religious, and neighborhood enclaves—fostered its own communities and networks that could cut across ethnic and religious lines. Through the stories of the lives of the men and women of railroading, an exhibition and accompanying programs and publications will demonstrate how the people of one industrial community represent, in microcosm, the vastness of Chicago society and, by extension, American society as a whole.
The next step after the Chicago exhibition, programs, and publications will be to follow Delano’s footsteps along the Santa Fe railway from Chicago to San Bernardino, California, with aspirations of exhibitions in railroad cities along that route. For all facets of the project, the goals are to teach the public about railroading’s unique character as a community within America’s society and about the diversity of individuals and their work within that community. Delano captured a rainbow. The pot of gold at its terminus will be what children and adults can experience and discover by seeing his pictures and being introduced to their meanings.
An introduction to Delano's railroad photography is presented in Railroad Heritage no. 22, available as a membership benefit or you may purchase single copies.
Center for Railroad Photogrphy & Art, 1914 Monroe St., P.O. Box 259330, Madison, WI 53725-9330 / 608-513-5291