Roger Puta
.jpg)
Roger Puta (pronounced "PEU tah" - it's Czech) was a prolific photographer who specialized in taking photos of trains, mass transit, railroad infrastructure (especially signal systems) and general architecture. Puta was born in 1944 in Berwyn, Illinois, and moved to Naperville, Illinois when he was five. He attended St. Procopius Academy, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Northwestern University, where he earned a master's degree in transportation.
Roger was commissioned as an Unrestricted Navy Line Officer on October 24, 1968. After serving in the US Navy during the Viet Nam war, Roger returned to Chicago and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, a job that provided him the opportunity to travel, and to continue his avid hobby of taking train and transit photos. In 1971, Roger went to work for the Western Pacific Railroad in San Francisco, and was later a partner, with Richard Twining, in "Scenic Hyway Tours," a tour bus company.
After his untimely death in 1990, Roger left his vast collection of color slides to his childhood friend and literary heir Mel Finzer, who made the decision to place Roger's photos in the public domain, and they have subsequently been very widely reproduced. Another childhood friend, Marty Bernard, has scanned and digitized close to ten thousand color slides, and put them online on the flickr photosharing website. Finzer and Bernard's only request to re-users of Puta's photos is that they credit him when they re-use them.
Thesis
- Roger Erwin Puta (1968). "The Public Image of American Railroads: A challenge to Railroad Management : Some selected case examples". Transportation Research Board. Archived from the original on 2021-03-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20210319212955/https://trid.trb.org/view/338208. Retrieved 2021-03-19.
References
- This article is based on personal correspondence with Mr. Puta's friends
