Portrait of America

The Journey

Over 180 hours of train travel, more than 20,000 photographs were taken from Amtrak windows on a route from New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, back to Chicago and on to San Francisco.

The same window frame was used throughout, providing a consistent view across a changing landscape.

The Exhibition

The exhibition brought the journey together across two gallery spaces. It included photographs from across the United States, 13 prints at original train-window size, a three-screen moving installation and a mosaic made from the wider set of 20,000 images.

More than 20,000 photographs were edited down to around 100, from which the final exhibition selection was made with the gallery.

Custom aluminium frames were made by Paul Williamson, based on the interiors of the Amtrak trains.

The Archive

Portrait of America marked an important development in the Train Window Archive. The photographs began to be treated not only as individual images, but as a larger collection that could be searched, compared and assembled in different ways.

A system developed with John Edwards allowed thousands of train windows to be straightened and cropped consistently, making it possible to build mosaics and other works from the wider journey.

This approach became the basis for the Train Window Archive.