Gerhard Luft

Or rather, two Austrian lenses, those of the acclaimed Viennese railway photographers Gerhard Luft and Harald Navé. Although they made a number of overseas excursions together until Navé died in a flying accident in 2004, as far as the UK is concerned they made separate visits, Luft in 1959 and Navé twice in 1964 and 1966.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, fine art photography established new ways for photographers to relate to their subject and concentrated much more on setting that subject into its environment, seeing "the relation between landscape, place and identity, place and history, and finally, the political significance of place." (Frits Gierstberg*) Well, some railway photographers has been doing this for decades beforehand, taking their subject - locomotives and trains - and setting them in their geographical and historical context through also recording their surroundings. As railways became matters for political debate, the photographs railway photographers took reflected that; for instance, there were huge debates in Britain in the 1990s as some of the privatised railway companies tried to restrict photographers who they saw as infringing their commercial confidentiality (as if a brightly-painted 120-ton locomotive thundering through the countryside could in any way be said to be 'confidential'). These dovetailed neatly into the arguments in the post-9/11 world as governments and law enforcement agencies attempted to clamp down on the photography of politics, policing and protest. The "I'm a photographer, not a terrorist" movement had much in common with the railway photographic community.

All this is a far cry from two young Austrians touring the UK and photographing locomotives that would seen exotic to them, and at the same time capturing much of the 1950s and 1960s railway scene. In contrast to the photographic landscape today, Luft and Navé received a lot of help and assistance from the various railway managements they encountered, if the number of photographs in this book taken from the "wrong side of the fence", or in engine shed yards and other areas that the public were not encouraged to visit is anything to go by. (In fairness, railways in Austria were less fenced in than we in Britain are used to, especially in the 1950s.)

These two photographers also pointed their cameras at the disappearing tram systems in places like Glasgow, Sheffield and Leeds; and Navé made it over to Northern Ireland in 1964, recording some of the engines to be seen around Belfast, some of them in colour. They photographed some of the newer diesels and electrics that they came across, although many of the "Pilot Scheme" diesels spent more time in sidings waiting for teething troubles to be addressed than in service. Exceptionally, Luft also managed to "bunk" London Transport's Lillie Bridge depot in 1959, photographing two of LT's rarely-seen fleet of steam engines - not the ex-GWR pannier tanks we have all become accustomed to, but an ex-Metropolitan Railway Peckett 0-6-0 saddle tank of 1899 vintage (L.54) and an ex-District Railway Hunslet tank engine of 1931, L.31, which sported de-icing equipment for the electrical contact (third) rail.

Many of these pictures give a glimpse into lives now more than sixty years in the past. i was particularly struck by a short sequence of pictures taken at Derby in August 1959, about the time we moved to the area for my father to take up work in the Signal and Telegraph drawing office in Derby. I found that personal connection quite direct. The pictures themselves are either well-balanced monochrome with a good tonal range, or glorious Kodachrome, which had to be used in bright conditions as in those days, colour film was not exceptionally sensitive ("fast").

All in all, an attractive and informative book which turned out to be much more thought-provoking than I expected.

*In an article on the Dutch documentary photographer Hans van der Meer in Camera Austria International, no.105/2009.… (plus d'informations)