Center for Railroad Photography & Art | Parallel Tracks: Steinheimer, Silicon Valley, & Steel Rails
Yesterday — November 14, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EST — I watched the ninety-minute webinar Parallel Tracks: Steinheimer, Silicon Valley, and Steel Rails about the life of photographer Richard “Dick” Steinheimer. The talk was presented by Ken Rehor, an electrical engineer from Palo Alto, CA, and Elrond Lawrence, Acquisitions & Marketing Coordinator at Center for Railroad Photography & Art (CRP&A), which hosted the webinar. Rehor had met Steinheimer while working with semiconductors at Bell Labs, while Lawrence met him photographing trains in Stockton, CA. The talk covered the life and photography of Steinheimer in great detail with accompanying photographs. The CRP&A currently has 30,000 Steinheimer slides, 4,200 prints, and 2,700 black and white negatives donated by his wife and fellow railfan, Shirley Berman-Steinheimer.
Steinheimer began taking photographs of trains in 1946 when he was seventeen years old. He went to City College of San Francisco, where Joe Rosenthal became his mentor. Rosenthal famously took the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of six United States marines hoisting an American flag at Iwo Jima. Other influences included the railroad photography publishing duo Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, along with photographer Bob Hale, who was known for his nighttime train photos. Early photographs by Steinheimer are preserved as color slides taken on an Anscochrome camera. These images use the same low angles, bold colors, and bright lighting that became his signature style.
From 1951 to 1962, Steinheimer worked for several newspapers, including Glendale News-Press, The Hoist for the U.S. Navy, and Marin Independent Journal. He won a prize from the California-Nevada Associated Press for “Life’s Darkest Moment”, which depicted a dog standing near a fire hydrant after a flood, while working for Marin Independent Journal. Despite this early success, Steinheimer left the newspaper industry and went to work for Fairchild Semiconductors in San Rafael, CA. He became the chief photographer with a $5,000 (about $51,000 in 2023) lab and studio space.
During the next phase of Steinheimer’s career, from 1962 to 1970, he worked in the Palo Alto area before it was called Silicon Valley. The transistor industry did not yet exist, but Steinheimer would be crucial to its founding. He photographed parts used in the NASA Apollo Program, including chips used in the Apollo Guidance Computer. Lawrence was astonished by the quality of Steinheimer’s photos: “They’re crisp. The detail is mind-blowing. The tonal range is astounding.”
Besides work with Fairchild, Steinheimer regularly photographed trains. Rehor worked with him on one of these trips, and they developed photographs in the dark room together. Steinheimer worked with Beebe to publish The Central Pacific & the Southern Pacific Railroad, Backwoods Railroads of the West, and Backwoods Railroads in Print, all in 1963. Several of Steinheimer’s trains photographs appeared on the covers of Trains magazine, while one of his chip photographs appeared on the cover of Scientific America.
Steinheimer changed direction from 1970 to 1972 as he partnered with Lawrence Bender to create the ad agency Steinheimer & Bender. As part of this work, Steinheimer photographed the first microprocessor created by Intel in 1971. The Intel website still uses his photograph of the Intel 1103 DRAM on their timeline, and the black-and-white Polaroid proof is in the CRP&A archives.
Steinheimer changed directions several times over the next thirteen years. In 1974, he worked for marketer Regis McKenna, who famously created marketing for Steve Jobs when Apple was just starting. From 1975 to 1977, he lived in the desert town of Silver City, CA. After this break, he returned to Palo Alto to work for Ford Aerospace, where a manager supposedly introduced him as “a railroad photographer, and grown men weep at the sound of his name.”
Changing direction again in 1981, Steinheimer started his own photography studio with Curt Fukuda in Mountain View, CA, to work on commercial railroad photography. His clients included Amtrak, Burlington Northern, TTX, and Chicago & North Western. During one project while photographing Rio Grande and Southern Pacific engines for an advertisement, Steinheimer became stuck in a cherry picker truck for several hours after the hydraulic system stopped working. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steinheimer photographs graced the covers of many timetables, posters, and brochures printed during the campaign Amtrak’s America.
As someone new to the world of railroad photography, this was my first time learning about Steinheimer and his work. I appreciated the wide range of slides and photographs presented during the talk, especially the work of Steinheimer. However, I sometimes lost track of the timeline to his story because of the stream of consciousness presentation style.