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The O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke is a tribute to an influential photographer and the end of an era in railroads. By Paul Sullivan Date published: 10/21/2006
IRECOGNIZED the name, Winston Link, but it meant little to me until two weeks ago when I visited an unusual Roanoke museum and gallery featuring his work. Link was a photographer, and it's ironic that his most famous work isn't the photos he shot for a living but the 2,500 or so images he took on his own in an effort to document the closing days of the era of steam railroading in America. But Link's powerful and dramatic work, we are now coming to understand, accomplished much more than building a visual record of mighty steam trains. The photographer, who took his wonderful works at dozens of locations throughout the Appalachian South, also assembled a record of a mountain crossroads culture that was disappearing along with those trains. Link, who died in 2001 at age 87, was a most unusual man. Educated as an engineer, the New York native spent his entire working life as a commercial photographer for marketing firms. But in the years after World War II, he noted regretfully the end of the era of steam railroading. The turning point in the photographer's career was a working assignment to Waynesboro in 1955, when Link, apparently with deliberate intent, shot a nighttime picture of a locomotive pulling into the quaint old wooden station there. The photo and a letter were mailed to the offices of the Norfolk & Western Railroad in Roanoke, asking for permission and assistance in launching Link's documentation project. That project, approved at once by the railroad, would change Link's life and give rise to his eventual fame as a photographer of national renown. For the next five years, Link focused on western Virginia and West Virginia, planning and executing thousands of images, capturing not just trains but the towns they served and the people who lived in those towns and hundreds of the people who made the trains run on time. What he compiled is a stunning, dramatic record--a record of an entire way of life that would soon give way to something entirely unforeseen by the people in his pictures.
Date published: 10/21/2006
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