Interior of a Railroad Car on the Pennsylvania Line

Born in Philadelphia, Rau photographed extensively throughout the American West, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East. He also participated in an international scientific expedition to New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, where he recorded the Transit of Venus across the sun in 1874. After opening his own photography business in 1885, Rau attained prominence for his photographs documenting scenery along the Pennsylvania Railroad and as official photographer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. For these commissions, he traveled across the Mid-Atlantic region in a railroad car specially outfitted as a luxury photography studio. The resulting images—made with mammoth glass negatives and albumen prints—intentionally recalled the bygone era of Western expansion and the work of pioneering photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, and William Bell (the artist’s mentor and father-in-law), with the aim of introducing city dwellers to the natural beauty of their own East Coast backyard. In this modestly sized platinum print from an eight-by-ten-inch glass negative, Rau transformed the interior of a railroad car into a harmonious pictorial study of light and shadow. The spare composition accentuates the formal beauty that Rau found amid the industrialization of America.