Following the Golden Spike: Time, Place, and Change Along the First Transcontinental Railroad

Terrace, Utah, showing ties left in place on the original Promontory transcontinental route. Drake Hokanson.

 

Join artist Drake Hokanson, contributing author and photographer to the Center’s publication After Promontory, in a re-photography trip along the original Union Pacific route in his virtual presentation, “Following the Golden Spike: Time, Place, and Change Along the First Transcontinental Railroad.”

 

Throughout the 150 years since the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, many parts of the 1,800-mile route between Omaha and Sacramento have changed enormously. Some sections are busy, three-track, state-of-the-art mainline; others are abandoned to the desert wind. In his presentation, Hokanson will address the broader history of railroads and photography and expand on how these two technologies came of age together in the nineteenth century and profoundly changed how we experienced the world. Through his black and white photographs, Drake Hokanson will explore the layered past, the natural and human geography, and the deeper meaning of this linear landscape.

 

Drake Hokanson is an author, photographer, and independent scholar who looks to the broad American land, its places, well-worn paths, people, and stories as the subjects for his photographs, books, exhibits, and essays. He is the author/co-author of three books, has edited and contributed to several others, and has exhibited photographs coast to coast. His other experience include teaching photography and nonfiction writing at the university level for some thirty years.