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Through a lens starkly The museum

October 21, 2006 1:33 am

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.

Link, said to be one of only two American photographers (the other being Ansel Adams) whose works are featured in a dedicated museum, is most widely known for two things: that his photographs were in black-and-white and that they were shot at night.

It may surprise anyone familiar with this photographer's work, but he did shoot color, and he did shoot in daytime--just as he also shot movie film and made technically excellent audio recordings of steam railroading, given the limitations of the equipment available at the time. Examples of each of these media are available in the museum, which shares space in the Roanoke Visitor Center opposite the stately old Roanoke Hotel, a 184-mile drive from Fredericksburg.

But it is Link's monotone pictures that carved his enduring reputation, not only as a master of light but as an innovator in controlling it to create painstakingly planned scenes.

Norfolk & Western's top officials loved the Brooklyn photographer's work and, over time, he developed a comfortable relationship with its personnel at all levels, and with it an unprecedented level of cooperation in his enterprise. It was said that Winston Link could stop a train, and indeed there were several occasions when he did so when necessary to carry out his complex photo sessions.

Link preferred to work at night in filming his creations because, as he once said, he couldn't move the trains and he couldn't control the rails, but he could control the light at night.

Accordingly, his photo shoots were typically the result of elaborate plans, taking hours to design and up to six days to execute! But the results were unlike anything anyone had seen and were an instant hit with railroad fans. But it would be years before others, particularly those in the photograhic-arts fields, would begin to appreciate the beautiful prints that resulted from his exacting attention to detail.

Link, one critic later said, took pictures with the mind of an engineer and the soul of an artist.

By the standards of our era, it's clear his scenes are no accident. So what? In each, he set out to capture faithfully the things, people and places of the railroad and the world where he found them.

Link did his Virginia-West Virginia railroad work in the latter half of the 1950s. As economic realities forced the Norfolk & Western to at last abandon steam, gradually giving way line by line to diesel power, Link was there to record it all.

After each of the 20-some trips he made southward from his Brooklyn studio to ride the rails in Virginia, he spent weeks in the darkroom creating his stunning prints. In time, critics began to notice them. A major turning point was the purchase of several Link railroading prints by the curator for a major New York gallery.

Link's personal life was not a particularly happy one, but those who knew and worked with him say he enjoyed life and had a wicked sense of humor. Winston Link, it appears, immersed himself in his Virginia railroad photos; he brought a passion to creating them, and it shows. And like all real artists, the man is as interesting as his work, as the Link museum makes clear.

PAUL SULLIVAN, a former reporter with The Free Lance-Star, is a freelance writer living in Spotsylvania County. Contact him by mail at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; or by e-mail at
Email: PBSullivan2@cs.com.