Stations (Flanagan)

    Michael Flanagan Stations (1994) Forty paintings depicting a fictional album of photographs and a few maps of two fictional railroads set in Virginia. They are the Buffalo and Shenandoah Railroad, and the Powhatan Railroad. The album pages bear hand-written notes by photographer Russell’s lover Anna, herself an artist, and sister of the memoirist Lucius. Lucius writes the notes for the pictures. The combination builds a blend of family memoir and regional history whose effect is hard to describe. A family tree and an extended introduction preface the “reproduction” of the album. A few items of apparatus (reference to a local professor of history, who has written an essay on the photographs; footnotes; careful crediting of the sources of the annotations) help with the illusion of authenticity.

     The album pages themselves look weathered, creased, and worn. Flanagan went to a lot of trouble to create that trompe l’oeil effect. At normal viewing distances, his images look like photos, too. Several paintings are based on actual photographs (credited). One of the photographs relates to an encounter with “Virgil Ross”, a model railroad builder who lived near the Powhatan Railroad. His model railroad and his character indicate that Flanagan knew about John Allen. I think he should have credited Allen, especially since the track plan of “Ross’s” layout is almost identical to the Gorre and Daphetid.
     A wonderful book, with a dreamy realism mixed with sharp edges, like sand mixed with broken stones. The overall tone is elegiac: Look what we have lost, it says, yet consider also how hard were the lives of the people who built and operated these railroads, and the people who lived near them and depended on them. Russell and Anna are misfits, for they cherish the reminders of the past, the bits and pieces of history. Russell’s project, to photograph every named place on the two railroads, reminds us that we tend to amnesia. *** (2001)