Join us for an inside look at the Richard Steinheimer & Shirley Burman Steinheimer Collection!
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
7:00 pm Central Time on Zoom
5 pm Pacific, 6 pm Mountain, and 8 pm Eastern
In a rush of locomotives climbing through smoky snow sheds, plowing “Sierra cement,” and carrying passengers over “the Hill,” Associate Archivist Heather Sonntag has viewed volumes of Richard Steinheimer’s visual storytelling across Donner Pass. She’s digitized frame after frame of his adventures on Southern Pacific’s legendary mountain crossing between Roseville and Truckee, California. In this exclusive Zoom program for Center members, see how Heather experienced this historic line through Stein’s famed photography of Donner that spans nearly fifty years, from 1951 to 1998.
She’ll provide an overview of Stein’s color work as it appears in the Richard Steinheimer and Shirley Burman Steinheimer Collection and notable publications. Focusing on the color slides in this extensive Donner series, Heather highlights a mix of iconic and previously unseen images that reflect Stein’s fearlessness, friendliness, and good fortune to document this favorite passage of railroad history, power, and people.
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Following Heather’s presentation, she’ll be joined by writer-photographer Elrond Lawrence, the Center’s Acquisitions & Marketing Coordinator and a lifelong Stein devotee, for final thoughts and an audience Q&A.
Heather Sonntag joined the Center in 2020 as an associate archivist. She holds a doctorate in cultural history with a focus on 19th-century photography albums and a master’s of library and information studies from UW-Madison. She has interned with the Library of Congress and worked as an assistant archivist of visual materials at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The Richard Steinheimer and Shirley Burman Steinheimer Collection is Heather’s second to process for the Center; the Ronald C. Hill Collection was her first.
Steinheimer’s snowy pre-dawn image of a westbound SP freight passing a spreader at Truckee, Calif., in March 1985. Steinheimer-Burman-AM-065.
SP trains at the Norden, Calif., snow sheds in March 1983. Photo by Richard Steinheimer, Steinheimer-Burman-D-132.
A sample slide from Heather’s upcoming presentation, featuring Stein’s Kodachromes with notes by him and wife Shirley.