Shirley Burman photographs

Biography

Shirley Burman is a documentary photographer, artist, and historian of women in the railroad industry. Born on November 24, 1934, she began using a camera at the age of 12, not knowing that photography would become a lifelong career.

After her children were in school, she enrolled in college and advanced to commercial photography and illustration during 1968-72. At age 36 she won her first award, recognized by her city college art faculty as a “promising photographer.” While at the University of California, Davis, she completed an internship with the local PBS station as an illustrator. In 1974 she began working seasonally for California State Parks as an illustrator and photographer, then onto the Bureau of Reclamation photographing a dam construction site; in 1978 she was hired as a permanent State Parks employee, assigned to document the construction of the future California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) in Sacramento. This included photographing the restoration of the museum’s rail equipment collection, sparking her love for railroad history. By 1981, she was also photographing the restored railroad equipment at the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City.

She met Richard “Dick” Steinheimer in 1983 at a reception for his exhibit at CSRM, where she was still working part-time. They shared an immediate attraction with their love of photography, adventure, and trains. They married a year and a half later following a five-month “self-assignment” collaboration photographing the rebuilding of a Southern Pacific snowshed on Donner Summit. She and Stein also produced a traveling exhibit, “Winter’s Professionals,” about the SP’s legendary snow-fighting crews.

Living in Sacramento, they managed a stock and commercial photography business but also worked independently. Steinheimer often joked about Shirley being a local “good ol’ girl,” as she kept busy with commercial jobs and with a historic ship restoration company anchored in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her photographs have appeared in the Southern Pacific Bulletin, in Trains and Classic Trains magazines, the NRHS Bulletin, Railroad Heritage, Amtrak Travel magazine, and other publications, as well as in two books with Steinheimer: Whistles Across the Land and Diesels over Donner.

Burman received the 2012 Fred A. and Jane R. Stindt Photography Award for her accomplishments as a railroad photographer, especially her documentation of women’s contributions to railroading that she began in 1980.

Burman’s first public showing of her women’s research was in 1990 with a slide lecture at the Oakland Museum, followed by an exhibition at the California State Railroad Museum titled “Women and the American Railroad.”  The exhibit traveled for thirteen years to more than thirty locations including libraries, state parks, and railroad museums. The images and text conveyed the historic scope of women’s participation in the development, management, and operation of American railroads.

Her first slide lecture was shown at the Oakland Museum to an all-women’s history group, followed by more well-received lectures at the Colorado State Historical Society, the Smithsonian, the California State Railroad and Nevada State Railroad museums, the Chicago Traffic Club, and for numerous railroad and non-rail groups. One of her favorite lectures was for a World War II anniversary event at Penn State University, where she portrayed a WWII railroad woman presenting the program. (This was her only attempt at acting, she notes, just as Stein once tried to write a fictional romance yarn about a railroader.)

In 2022 she released her own hardcover book about the history of women in railroading, Sisters of the Iron Road, in which she drew upon the research begun forty years earlier studying historical archives and photographing women railroaders to present their definitive story.

Burman still resides in Sacramento, where she’s cared for Stein’s image collection and legacy since passing. Her photography, as well as her collaboration and memoir materials, are part of the Richard Steinheimer and Shirley Burman Collection.