Stretching from polar to sub-tropical latitudes and straddling the world's longest non-militarized border, Anglo-America is a vast geo-cultural bloc of a Cold War superpower and an outpost of the British Empire. By Rail looks at Canada and the United States along their rail infrastructures. It considers the armature these nations were built upon and it evokes the contradictory narratives of romantic expansionism and post-colonial, post-industrial malaise.
With independence from England, the United State's colonial economy gave way to a continental mercantile society. Steam ships and canals facilitated early growth, then a functional railway system fostered a bi-coastal nation. Canadian confederation relied upon an east-west link to foil America's northward spread. European immigrants laid down tracks from the Atlantic and from the Pacific raw Chinese labour broke through mountains. Cities evolved from whistle-stops and imported citizens displaced natives.
North American society has been uniquely affected by railways and their command of landscape; it maintains a distinct yet puzzling relationship with them. While the rest of the developed world is decades into a rail renaissance, North America privileges automobiles and designs its cities accordingly. In spite of rail's role in a golden age, riding with others to common destinations is somehow bound up with vague notions of communism. Railways are both a source of pride and hysterical threat. As western preeminence wains and industrialization's environmental costs accumulate, polarized voices pit change against retrogression. It's no coincidence that America's first multi-racial leader was also the first president-elect in fifty years to arrive in Washington by rail.
This series considers the ubiquitous overlooked lines that once drew disparate territories together. Its ambivalence between grand flattery and pointed critique echoes a civilization poised between illustrious past and a dawning era.
Scott Conarroe (b. 1974, Canada) has a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is the 2011 recipient of the Duke and Duchess of York Photography Prize. He is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Selected by Emma Morris, Photoworks
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