Born in 1914 in Brooklyn,
NY, O. Winston Link was an American photographer who found his love for
photography, locomotives, and rail yards as a teenager (“O. Winston Link”). He
studied at, and graduated from, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a degree
in Civil Engineering. Shortly after, he accepted a job at a public relations
firm as a photographer. This began his long, successful photographic career. He
is best known for his photographs of steam locomotives. “For Link the trains
were comparable to Garbo and Dietrich at their most glamorous” (“O. Winston
Link”). Link is also credited for pioneering night photography, mainly because
the steam looked a dingy grey during the day, but a brilliantly bright white
against a night sky. He also appreciated night photography because it removed
the ever-moving sun from the scene, allowing him to work without having to
reposition lights and worry about shadows during his shoots.
During WWII Link was
unable to contribute to the war effort directly because of near-total deafness
in one ear. As a result, he began working in a wartime laboratory to help
develop a device that would discover submarines using low-flying aircraft. The lab was located near the Long Island Rail
Road, and his love for the locomotives was revived. He ignored the wartime ban
on railroad photography.
Link had a famously cranky
character and disposition, but that obviously didn't detract others from
working with him. “Usually with an assistant, he drove to his sites and, for
nighttime scenes, began setting up complex lighting equipment, a painstaking
process that could take from several hours to three days.” (Loke, Margarett). He had a flair for storytelling in his images;
even today a viewer feels like they are viewing the scene through a window
rather than a photograph.
In the mid-1950s, while on
assignment photographing modern comforts for his public relations firm, Link
had an epiphany. At this time, most of the major American railroads were
replacing steam locomotives with diesels and Link felt a strong need to
document the dying days of this type of railroading. The next five years found
Link traveling through small railroad towns in the Shenandoah Valley and
Appalachian mountains, shooting photographs, film, and making recordings of the
concluding era.
“Not only did he get
Norfolk & Western’s approval for his project, but he was given a key to the
railroad’s switch boxes. This meant he could telephone dispatchers for exact
arrival times and, on occasion, to ask them to delay a train or to backtrack so
he could take the desired picture” (Loke). In modern times airlines are rarely
operational according to schedule and cell phones allow for immediate contact;
realizing the weight of the opportunity N&W offered to Link can be
difficult. If a train was even one minute behind schedule tracks could become
clogged and collisions could occur. Having the power to ask a conductor to
delay their schedule so a photograph could be taken shows the value N&W
held for Link’s photography.
Link’s work has been
described as being “…on the brink on the absurd, but stop just short…” and
“tell-it-like-is (but-never-was)” (McCann). His style dances somewhere between
fine art and documentary; on the one hand he was documenting the end of an era,
but on the other hand he posed his subjects in an effort to get what appears to
be a candid picture of them. His style gave him the opportunity to be a grand
storyteller through his images. His formative years having been spent in
Brooklyn, he idealized small-towns and spent much of his time photographing the
Iron Horses in such a setting. His project ended in 1960, just before N&W
retired their last steam engine and became a fleet of all diesel trains.
Nearly 30 years after
Link’s epiphany, he began to exhibit his works in museums in the United States,
and Europe. Several books have been written by Link including Ghost Trains: Railroad Photographs of the
1950s, Night trick and The Last Steam Railroad in America; others
have been written about him like O.
Winston Link: Life Along the Line: A Photographic Portrait of America’s Last
Great Steam Railroad. But the best tribute to his work resides within the
walls of an old N&W station in Roanoke, VA. The O. Winston Link Museum was
Link’s final project. He died in 2001, missing the grand opening of the museum
in 2004. As disappointing as this may be, missing his own museum opening is not
the most tragic detail about the end of his days.
Link was married to his
second wife, Conchita, for nearly a decade before he sought divorce. The
hostile divorce battle became entangled with Link’s accusations of Conchita
committing grand larceny, isolation, and imprisonment. He alleged that Conchita
caused his driver’s license to be suspended, cut his telephone off, and told
gallery owners that Link suffered from Alzheimer’s disease (Loke). Conchita was
indicted and convicted of stealing 1,400 prints worth over $1.6 million; none
of the stolen prints or negatives has been recovered. In 1996, Conchita was
sentenced to 6 1/3-to-20 years in prison. According to an interview with Link,
some of the stolen prints and negatives shows the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
being built (Loke).
 |
| Link, O. Winston. Hotshot Eastbound. 1956. Print. O. Winston Link Museum. |
In one of Link’s most
famous photographs, Hotshot Eastbound (see above),
the viewer will see three modern forms of transportation: on the big screen an
airplane is flying through the air, cars are parked in a drive-in movie
theater, and a steam locomotive cuts through the scene at the top of the
photograph. The image was created at night, giving the photograph Link’s
signature white billows of steam from the train. The use of lines in the
photograph is strong. The power lines almost give a track for the steam to
glide along, the cars line up side-by-side to view the movie, and the line of
steam fills in where a dark sky would be. This photograph is riddled with
metaphors. The steam locomotive is rushing out of the photograph as quickly as
it seemed to be rushing out of use on the railways. Later, in the darkroom,
Link added an image of an airplane (from a different image during that night of
shooting) because his flash washed out the image on the screen during this shot.
The way the plane is angled, it’s hard to ignore the symbolism of airplanes
rushing in the scene to replace trains as a mode of transportation. The cars,
pointing toward the plane, seem to stare down the plane in a defiant manner
that states, “We’re here to fight for center stage as well”, while completely
ignoring the train altogether. No matter how you view the photograph, it’s hard
to ignore the couple in the bottom of the picture plane. They embrace each
other in the privacy of their car, gazing upon the airplane while also ignoring
the train.
 |
| O. Winston Link. Shaffers Crossing Roundhouse. Roanoke, West Virginia. 1958. Print. O. Winston Link Museum. |
As Link spent his days
photographing the final days of steam locomotives, he didn’t forget that these
massive beauties couldn’t run themselves. “For all the technical demands he
made of himself, Link regarded people as the lifeblood of his pictures – he
disparaged solitary train photographs as ‘hardware shots’ – and the fierce
pride of the railroad families came through in his pictures” (Dell’Amore). This
rings true in Shaffers Crossing
Roundhouse. As an electrician cleans the headlight of a train, Link
composes and shoots the moment. It is difficult to remember that these images
were, by and large, staged to look candid. The moment looks almost intimate
between the train and her controller. If the train were a horse, the
electrician may have instead been feeding it a carrot while brushing her mane. Rather,
the electrician is taking the time to maintain the large piece of machinery
despite the fast-approaching retirement. Looking at images of steam trains lets
the viewer know that the invention was large, but Shaffers Crossing Roundhouse reminds us of exactly how overbearing
the machine was.
 |
| O. Winston Link. The Birmingham Special Crossing Bridge 201. 1957. Print. O. Winston Link Museum. |
The Birmingham Special Crossing Bridge 201 shows the locomotive
rushing out of the photograph as a personal vehicle (a truck) enters and is
pointing directly at the viewer. The brilliant white smoke pours out of the
train, drawing the eye to the train and making the large piece of machinery
appear to be slicing through the scene quickly and on a strict path. The truck,
on the other hand, chugs through the image relatively slowly; but this independent
piece of machinery is able to divert from any chosen path to create its own
journey. This image almost prefigures
the upcoming hippie movement with the big, traditional social status of
fighting wars, segregation, and status quo being represented by the train
above; the free spirit, changes in societal values, and desire to make one’s
own path is represented in the smaller truck below. The truck doesn’t take on
the locomotive head-on; it would be suicide. Rather, it questions the path of
the train and chooses to follow a different one. With the Vietnam War, the
Civil Rights Movement, and Women’s Liberation about to come to the forefront of
America’s focal point, The Birmingham
Special Crossing Bridge 201 almost foreshadows this turning point in American
History before any of it even happened.
Several modern
photographers credit Link as inspirations for their more contemporary works.
Among them, Gregory Crewdson is a modern-day photographer who is one of the
pioneers of large-scale contemporary color photography (“American Darkness:
Gregory Crewdson and O. Winston Link”). Like Link, Crewdson’s scenes are
elaborately staged, and many of his images portray small-town America. Both
photographers have strong, dramatic images set between dusk and dawn. But while
Link’s black and white night photography is comforting and nostalgic,
Crewdson’s color photography is tense and slightly unsettling. Link devoted his
vision to idealizing small-town America; Crewdson shows destitution. Link’s
images deal with literal images of trains with symbolic meanings to be
interpreted, Crewdson’s images deal with emotional moments between humans
leading the viewer to ponder what happened before the photograph was taken, and
what will happen after. Both photographers worked in the transitional stages;
Link showed the transition from steam railroading, Crewdson’s photographs lie
in the transitional moments between what happened before the photograph was
taken and the resulting situation afterward. See an example of Crewdson’s work
below. Link’s legacy lives on in his published works, and the photographers he
has influenced since.
Works Cited
“American Darkness: Gregory Crewdson and O. Wilston Link”. www.danzingergallery.com.
9 May – 14 June 2013. Web. 3 August 2014.
Dell’Amore, Christine. “The Big Picture”. www.smithsonianmag.com.
December 2005, Web. 3 August 2014.
Loke, Margarett. “O. Winston Link, Photographer, Dies at 86.” www.nytimes.com. 2 February 2001. Web. 2
August 2014.
McCann, Matt. “When Steam Locomotion Ground to a Halt”. www.lens.blogs.nytimes.com.
16 November 2012. The NY Times. Web. 30 July 2014. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/when-steam-locomotion-ground-to-a-halt/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
“O. Winston Link”. www.danzigergallery.com. n.d. Web. 30 July 2014. http://www.danzigergallery.com/artists/owinston-link
O. Winston Link Museum. 2014. Web. 30 July 2014. http://www.linkmuseum.org/
“O. Winston Link Exhibition”. www.railphoto-art.org. Center for Railroad
Photography & Art, n.d. Web. 30 July 2014. http://www.railphoto-art.org/exhibits/link/
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