Faces of Chicago’s Railroad Community: Photos by Jack Delano

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The Center is proud to announce a collaborative exhibition with the Chicago History Museum set to open in autumn 2013. It will feature some sixty of the remarkable images created in 1942-43 by Jack Delano as part of his assignment to document the nation’s railroad story for the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information. While Delano also photographed infrastructure and rolling stock, he concentrated on the people who did the work of railroading. Roy Stryker, head of the photographic surveys for both FSA and its successor OWI, instructed Delano to document in pictures the importance of the railroad industry during wartime and the contributions made by railroaders and their families to World War II on the home front. Delano complied. His images feature such scenes as children collecting salvaged metal for recycling into war materiel, posters in public and private places promoting the sale of war bonds, and the ubiquitous flags that honored service men and women.

The agreement with the Chicago History Museum provides for more than “pictures on a wall.” The Center also intends to create a heavily illustrated catalog/book about the photographs and the people in them, plus a gathering of the very few surviving portrait subjects, together with descendants of subjects who have died. Searching for family members of the portrait subjects is a time-consuming undertaking, which then must be followed up with person-to-person interviews. The Center’s exhibition wish list includes artifacts belonging to the portrait subjects, modern photographs of their descendants, and even sound bites of interviews. Assembling all these pieces, with only a small staff, will be an exciting challenge in time management and fund raising.

For its part, the Chicago History Museum is underwriting the expenses and work of preparing and mounting the exhibition itself. Because Delano captured workers of many ethnic groups and races, Chicago Faces meshes with CHM’s ongoing exhibition series that features the city’s rainbow of communities. The museum has embraced the Center’s exhibition proposal wholeheartedly and we at the Center look forward to working with its staff over the next three years.

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.

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 a glass dome 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 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 agreement with the Chicago History Museum provides for more than “pictures on a wall.” The Center also intends to create a heavily illustrated catalog/book about the photographs and the people in them, plus to sponsor a gathering of the very few surviving portrait subjects, together with descendants of subjects who have died. Searching for family members of the portrait subjects is a time-consuming undertaking, which then must be followed up with person-to-person interviews. The Center’s exhibition wish list includes artifacts belonging to the portrait subjects, modern photographs of their descendants, and even sound bites of interviews. Assembling all these pieces, with the Center’s small staff, is an exciting challenge in time management and fund raising.

Delano’s railroad photography is presented in Railroad Heritage:

Railroad Heritage is 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