The exhibition The Railroad and the Art of Place: Photographs by David Kahler traces industrial rail lines across America’s Appalachian coal country. Once thriving economic centers, Kahler’s view of small-town West Virginia and Kentucky illustrates the ebb and flow of communities dependent on railroad traffic amidst the decline of the once powerful coal industry. Desolate, yet beautiful, Kahler’s photographs expertly capture the raw emotions attached to the railroad industry. Along with the loss of major coal productions in the region and the resulting economic vacuum it created as it disappeared, the railroad continues to serve as a financial lifeline and a reminder of a richer past.

In the late 1980s, Kahler was deeply inspired by seeing an exhibition of O. Winston Link photographs. He soon began making annual trips to the West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields, destinations that strongly resonated with his own aesthetic of “place.” Armed with a used Leica M6 and gritty Tri-X film, he and his wife made six week-long trips in the dead of winter to photograph trains along the Pocahontas Division of the Norfolk Southern Railway. From those thousands of images come the work that comprises the book and this companion exhibition.

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