A photographer of trains.

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Being a train photographer means your output will immediately be subject to comparison with that of O. Winston Link in much the same way a street snapper’s work will be hauled up against that of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Neither is a winning proposition.

Regardless of genre preferences, any photographer’s library should include Link’s Steam, Steel and Stars and HC-B’s The Man, the Image and the World.

On those grounds, Richard Steinheimer’s book of fine railway photographs would not be your first choice but even if you care little for railroad photography, it deserves serious consideration.

Steinheimer (1929-2011) was up against it from the start as relatively little of his long career coincided with the age of steam. A steam locomotive makes the machine the star, regardless of setting. Link’s genius was to personalize it in the guise of the proud operators in the last days of steam he so magnificently photographed. (‘Documented’ would be a rare insult, indeed). Steinheimer’s work is more detached, more focused on the machine in its expansive settings in the west. People are not his forte. Link, by contrast, added that something special with his social awareness.

Steam appeals to the romantic in us but I can assure you that there was nothing romantic about traveling in a steam train. I took one from London to Dundee, aged eight in 1959, to visit my eldest sister, then a student at St. Andrew’s University. Forgetting to close the window as we entered a tunnel, I exited covered in soot and smelling like a linebacker after the Superbowl. There was nothing romantic about it, other than to a distant observer’s viewing the Flying Scotsman’s patrician progress through the beauty of Scotland’s countryside, a head of steam defining the machine’s progress.

You could also argue that taking pictures of steam trains is rather like photographing Angelina Jolie. Even your bad ones are going to look pretty good. On that basis, O. Winston Link is the Irving Penn of train photographers.

Steinheimer certainly added a special something to his images, generally incorporating the expanses of the great American west with outstanding compositional sense. The book is well printed, if not as well as the Link one and, unlike the latter, can still be found new and unblemished. Unsurprisingly, the cover picture is of a steam train ….