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I had been waiting for a train a year before, in the same yard heading in the same direction, but nothing seemed particularly familiar. The Minneapolis Burlington Northern yards stretch northwest from under the university and they go on for miles; ten, fifteen, twenty tracks wide; spurs heading north, spurs heading east; and somewhere in the maze a main line that carries the hotshot out of Chicago through Minneapolis to the west. I stood in the shadows of huge grain elevators, out of sight of the control tower, and I waited for a train due at midnight.
Back in the early 1970’s, sociologist Douglas Harper jumped freight trains, to get to orchards in the Pacific Northwest so he could do harvest work picking apples. He documented his conversations with the tramps he met and photographed the life he saw. In 1982, then again in 2006, his outstanding piece of ethnographic narrative was published as Good Company: A Tramp Life.
Courtesy of Harper, American Ethnography is privileged to present our readers with an excerpt from the book. Here’s Waiting for a Train.
![[Book cover of Good Company shows a tramp in an empty box car, sitting on the floor and looking out through the open door at the passing landscape.]](./img/globals/0.png)
Back while he was doing fieldwork among lowriders in the southwestern states of USA, American Ethnography’s owner and editor Martin Hoyem photographed the people he met and their cars. Here’s a gallery of Hoyem’s photos from his fieldwork. We’ve called it Southern California Lowriders: Los Angeles 2005.
We have a gallery of New Mexico lowriders by photographer Jack Parsons. Jack is the grandson of pioneering anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and tells us he has “a soft spot for cultural anthropology.” See the gallery here.
“A good thing about Polaroids,” artist and photographer Jack Butler says, “is that you take the picture and it’s ready right away, so you can use the photo to initiate a conversation with your subjects.”
Butler has photographed the hot rod culture of Southern California since 2003 using a Polaroid loaded pinhole camera. We have put together a gallery with selections from this unique documentation project. Click here to check it out.
We cleaned out the closet, and found a few leftover serigraphs from the “Car Customizing & Outlaw Aesthetics” series. We are now practically giving them away for the price of $14.95 (plus shipping).
Look for it in our online store.