I was wrong about O. Winston Link’s extraordinary photographs of steam locomotives. Produced in the late 1950s, when most railroads had already made the switch from steam to diesel power, his images depict the last great steam engines working on the Norfolk and Western Railroad. Mistakenly, I thought that company had commissioned the series.
In fact, Link’s five-year project of over 2,400 black and white negatives was entirely a labor of love. A commercial photographer working in New York City, Link was a train buff who decided to document the last working steam locomotives. To finance the endeavor, he produced and sold recordings of train sounds, a big fad for mid-century homeowners spinning 33 1/3 LPs on their new mahogany stereo consoles.
A monumental and beautifully produced body of work that far surpasses “train art” or mechanical portraiture, Link’s photographs show the trains as elements in an iconic American landscape. Also featured are children frolicking in a waterfall, small town main streets, general stores, neighbors rocking on porches, teenagers parked in convertibles at the drive-in theater and gathered on the deck of a swimming pool. Artfully composed to tell stories, Link’s photographs are also crisp, large-format testaments to painstaking craftsmanship.
He shot them at night, using a 4 X 5 Graphic View camera, forests of lights and miles of cables. They rook hours to set up. The picture was controllable with lights, he said; nighttime would simply erase what he did not light. But, equally important is the billowing, graphic beauty of the locomotive’s white steam plume against a black night sky. During the day, the steam looks gray.
Link, who died in 2001 at age 86, made his last steam engine photograph in March of 1960. The last steam locomotive ran in May of that year.
Since 2007, one of the best reasons to visit Roanoke, Virginia – and there are many good reasons to travel to this beguiling city nestled in the Blue Ridge – is to visit the O. Winston Link Museum. The great photographs are displayed in the former Norfolk and Western passenger station at 101 Shenandoah Ave NE in Roanoke, along with various changing exhibits, gift shops and the like. For more information, visit http://www.linkmuseum.org
For train buffs, Roanoke was and remains a rail hub. The nearby Virginia Museum of Transportation is just down the street. http://vmt.org. If your taste runs more towards Frank Gehry-inspired architecture and crowd-pleasing exhibits, walk to the Randall Stout-designed Taubman Museum of Art. http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/main/