the steamgirl on a train.

The more often I see models posed on top of the highly dangerous coupling rods & wheels of steam engines, the more I realize how no steampunk in their right mind would ever risk actually sitting on them.

The above's a well-known & over-posted particular example of an accident just waiting to happen.

It would be the technological parallel to someone posing on the rods of a nuclear reactor core. Maybe daring steampunks could write it off as the alt-hist version of planking, but no. As steampunk photography's meant to show a believable alternate history, then standing on a moving train part you wouldn't ever stand on breaks the premise we strive for.

In establishing an alt-historical world, we require a level of verisimilitude. It's the history we know, but with a major point of deviation, usually technological, but sometimes political or social. To suspend disbelief and entertain the idea that history turned down a different track requires world-building that respects logical action.

I also suffered a defense of the above photo because some undersexed geek superimposed his idea of chivalry on it, as though I didn't appreciate the beauty of the model, which isn't at issue -- the would-be steampunk's lack of thought for personal safety is.

So why does this photo's idiotic motif of the steamgirl on a train persist?

[Pregnant aspiring model Fredzania Thompson, 19, was killed by a freight train after she became stuck between two railroad tracks while posing for this photo shoot.]

In most photography, we are used to a fashion or artistic context.

For fashion, which far outweighs the circulation of art nowadays and so it's the device people are most familiar with, models are asked to pose in outré fashions, against nonsensical & outlandish things, all to get the attention of someone flipping at rapid pace through a magazine, or scrolling down a page so as to get the viewer to pause and buy a line of handbags or designer frocks. For example, the early 1980s Swatch ads had a girl looking through a telescope backwards, posed on one leg, the other leg up behind her, while was wearing sunglasses, and the telescope was pointed down at the ground. Like the steamgirl on a train, none of that makes any real sense, but the cognitive dissonance of the cited ad makes a viewer stop in question and look long enough at what's being worn to segue into desiring the product.

For the artistic, it's emotional aesthetics. A work is presented with a captured tableau that if successful evokes a reaction from the viewer. It could be one of repulsion, joy, agreement, moral uncertainty, social consciousness, fear, anguish, sorrow, et cetera, all depending on a combination of the photographer's intention and the individual internal reflection the viewer brings to the work. With a fair amount of photo manipulation today, we have many examples of cut & paste in order to construct worlds that never were to evoke wonders of another place & time we might desire to see or be in.

The steamgirl on a train fails because it's using the tropes of fashion photography while attempting to show a character from a greater world implied outside the frame. Still people can't see past the sex appeal of the cheesecaking model to the danger of the train, hit the plus button, and don't have discernment to realize the serious incongruence it does to establishing the world it's trying to imply. This hormonal override is why the steamgirl on a train persists.

And outside of these two mores, we have photojournalism like the following:

The photo above's a grisly and all-too-real example of what being too near a train at the wrong time does to a person. Newspapers tend to refuse to run photos like these because, as one professor I had in my journalism degree program said, "People don't want blood served with their eggs and bacon in their morning paper." Which also goes to say that it's not commercially viable content. Yet if papers had run more of the last photo in the past as a cautionary example, perhaps there'd be no foolhardy steamgirls set atop body chewing coupling rods and meat grinding train wheels, much less drivers trying to beat trains at crossings, or kids playing on tracks, with consistently fatal results.

And perhaps having to write this essay addresses a larger and more disconcerting problem in steampunk culture: That most have come to value an aesthetic shellac of thin brass paint and cogslappery over an actual participatory maker ethos. That we've perhaps forgotten the original manifestos of imagination made real, the desire to transform the world into one of our own choosing, and maybe this is also an unfortunate creative gap that requires minding lest the engine of the superculture we're commenting on runs over us in the end.

Steampunks & everyone else:
Don't muck about on trains.
Make what you want in the world to change it.
Mind the fucking gap.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.