In His Lens, A Vanished Era

“Yeah, I’m a nut,” O. Winston Link once admitted. “And the world needs more nuts,” he added, peering through a window of the old train depot in Abingdon, Va.

The elderly New York photographer was in town for an arts center exhibit of his remarkable pictures documenting the last years of steam railroading in America. Taken a half century earlier in southwest Virginia, the photographs of huge black locomotives rolling through idealized rural settings were Link’s personal vision of what was good about our nation.

When he died in February at age 86, Link left behind a heartfelt legacy in black and white. His pictures are in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the director of photography once described the enigmatic Link as “a legitimate American genius.”

Link made a dozen self-financed photographic expeditions to Virginia between 1955 and 1959. By that time, most railroads had converted to diesel power. But the Norfolk & Western Railway still had coal-burning locomotives rumbling along in spectacles of noise, steam, and smoke. Concentrating on the mountainous section of the N&W line between Bristol and Roanoke, Link captured the men and machines of railroading and everyday life along the tracks. “I never got paid,” Link once explained. “The purpose of the whole project was to preserve a beautiful era in America.”

The photographer’s arrival in a small town—behind the wheel of his big Buick convertible filled with cameras and flash equipment—“was always a real public occurrence,” remembers Thomas Garver, executor of Link’s estate. “Winston loved the mountain people who lived along the line. They delighted him. And they liked Winston and appreciated that he took an interest in them.”

Link’s dramatic night photographs, in particular, were gargantuan technical challenges. To light up the darkness and freeze the fleeting moment, Link had to set up multiple synchronized flash units placed at far-flung locations, all connected to the camera with hundreds of feet of cable. And he had only one chance to get it right, which he almost always did.

At the time of his death, Link and city officials in Roanoke were discussing the establishment of an O. Winston Link museum in the city’s old N&W passenger station. Encouraging talks still continue between the city and the trustees and heirs of Link’s estate, according to Garver.

Why was Link so fascinated by old trains?

“I guess it’s because the steam engine was always a symbol of traveling ... of going places,” he once said. “They’re always going through mountains, valleys, and forests. And I like them because they are alive. They seem to breathe. A locomotive talks … it grunts and groans. And when it’s in motion, a steam engine is absolutely beautiful.”

Bob Alexander writes from his home in Franklin, Tenn.

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