The Livingston Depot Museum will host a guest lecture by Steve Jackson, Art and Photography Curator for the Museum of the Rockies, on Thursday, June 16, at 7 p.m. Jackson will tell the story of photographer Ron Nixon, whose railroad images are featured at the Depot as a 2016 special exhibit, as well as of the digitizing of nearly twelve thousand of Nixon’s images into an online collection. His presentation will be followed by a reception including light refreshments and is free to the public.
Jackson has worked with the museum for nearly thirty-five years and curated over fifty exhibitions of fine arts, photography, and history. He is also an adjunct professor with the School of Film and Photography at Montana State University, Bozeman, teaching classes in the history of photography and photo theory and criticism. His research areas include early Yellowstone photographic history as well as the preservation, management, and databased digitization of photo collections. Regarding the Nixon collection, he commented, “Not only was Ron a significant photographer, but he was also a respected rail historian in his own right, and his interests even extended to trying to get a photo of every Northern Pacific engine in service.”
“The Railroads of Ron Nixon,” an eye-catching selection of photos of the Northwestern rails, is a traveling special exhibit on display at the Depot through mid-September. The images range from a personal visit with an engineer in a cab to artistic silhouettes on trestles, wrecks, and dogged winter freight ascents of mountain passes.
Nixon grew up in the early 1900s in a Northern Pacific family of telegraphers across various Montana locations. His mother was also an avid amateur photographer who not only taught him Morse code but started him young into shooting images starting with a circus train crew. By 1930 his images were receiving rave reviews and began to appear in magazines, newspapers, rail company posters, advertisements, and calendars, and his own published articles. He died in 1989 with over 30,000 photos to his credit, and his collection went to the Museum of the Rockies in 1993, now traveling to museums like the Depot.
The additional 2016 special exhibit, “Getting There: From Livingston to Yellowstone,” will look at the relation between Livingston and the park, the final leg of rail travel for most of the park’s earliest years, in honor of the National Park Service’s centennial celebration in 2016.
The Depot Museum’s popular ongoing main exhibit “Rails Across the Rockies: A Century of People and Places” introduces visitors to the rich history of railroading in Montana with special attention to the Northern Pacific and its central role in the opening of Yellowstone, America’s first national park, through Livingston beginning in the 1880s. In addition to the main and special exhibits, the museum also presents “The Livingston Depot in History and Architecture,” “Film in Montana: Moviemaking under the Big Sky,” and selections from “On Track: The Railroad Photography of Warren McGee.”
The Depot Museum exhibits in 2016 will run from Friday, May 13 through late September. Located at 200 West Park, the Depot is open Monday through Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from 1 to 5. Additional information can be obtained by contacting the Depot office at (406) 222-2300 or visiting www.livingstondepot.org.
