Galleries: A picture-perfect time for pictures at Haverford

There's no better time to meander through Haverford College's leafy campus than the present, when the leaves are crimson and orange and three of the college's five art galleries are simultaneously putting on their own brilliant displays.

It's also an opportune moment to immerse yourself in photography, which happens to be the medium of choice through early December at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, the Atrium Gallery in the Marshall Fine Arts Building, and the Magill Library's Alcove Gallery.

The railroad is king again in the shows at the Atrium and Alcove galleries - "Walker Evans in Color" at the former (Evans shot many a train, you'll be reminded) and "The Railroad in the Landscape" at the latter, both organized by Haverford professor of fine arts William Earle Williams. The Cantor Fitzgerald's "Through the Plain Camera: Small and Shapely Pleasures in Contemporary Photography," of works by five contemporary photographers, has nothing to do with trains, but its curators, Sarah Kaufman (Haverford College '03) and Rebecca Robertson (Bryn Mawr College '00) are former students of Williams.

Evans famously put down color photography as "vulgar," but the 32 color photographs of trains in the Atrium Gallery, taken by Evans for Fortune magazine in the 1950s for photo essays documenting the decline of the American railroad, are as plainspoken and eloquent as any of his black-and-white images. Only color film, you realize, could have caught the enduring appeal of the boxcar, its flat, familiar brown, maroon, or yellow (some minimalist painters have to have borrowed from these), and its stylish logos - Great Northern, Wabash, Northern Pacific, and Atlantic Coast Line among them.

(10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 12 to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through Dec. 4.)

 By contrast, the Alcove Gallery's photographs (by early and contemporary photographers), which Williams culled from Haverford's own collection (of which he is curator), depict the railroad and its trains in the landscape of the American West. In the show's 19th-century prints (William Henry Jackson, A.J. Russell, others), transcontinental travel is being promoted and celebrated; in its contemporary images (Mark Ruwedel, Scott Connaroe, others), rail travel is edging towards obsolescence.

(9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through Dec. 4).