O. Winston Link

Ogle Winston Link , known as O. Winston Link , ( December 16, 1914 - January 30, 2001 ) was an American photographer.

He was best known for his black and white photos and tape recordings of the last scheduled steam locomotive operations in the United States in the 1950s. As a professional photographer, he helped establish railway photography as a hobby. His night photographs were also groundbreaking. The photos "Hotshot Eastbound" (a train passes a drive-in theater) and "Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole" (a train crosses a bridge under which children bathe) are well known.

youth

Link was named after two of his maternal ancestors: House Speaker John Winston Jones and Pennsylvania MP Alexander Ogle . Link and his siblings Eleanor and Albert Jr. grew up in Brooklyn, New York . His father Albert taught woodworking at a New York school. His children were interested in arts and crafts and Winston was also interested in photography.

The first photos on the left were taken with a borrowed medium format camera from Kodak . He was in high school then and built his own enlarger. After school, Link went to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and studied engineering. Shortly before his graduation in 1937, Link spoke at a banquet for the institute newspaper, for which he worked as a photographer. A managing director of Carl Byoir's advertising company was impressed by Link's speech and offered him a job as a photographer.

Career

O. Winston Link worked for Carl Byoir and Associates for five years . There he learned the most important basics for his later career. He quickly adopted the prevailing style, creating images that looked real but emphasized a certain point. Well-known photos from this period are, for example, the image of a man pointing a gun at a pig with a bulletproof vest, or “What Is This Girl Selling?”, Also known as “Girl on Ice”. The latter became widely known in the United States and featured in Life magazine as a classic promotional photo.

In 1942 OW Link left Byoir. Since he had lost his hearing due to mumps infection, he was not called up for active military service. He therefore worked for a laboratory for aircraft instruments, which was attached to Columbia University . Due to his degree and his professional experience, Link worked as a project engineer and photographer during this time. Among other things, the laboratory developed a device for submarine location for low-flying aircraft. Link was mainly responsible for the photographic documentation of the project.

With the end of the Second World War, the work in the laboratory also ended. O. Winston Link did not accept the offer to return to Byoir. In 1946 he opened his own photo studio in New York . Its first customers were Goodrich , Alcoa , Texaco and Ethyl .

Railroad Photography - The Norfolk and Western Project

During an industrial photography assignment in Staunton, Virginia in 1955, a nearby route on the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) came into view and his love for the railroad was revived. The N&W was the last Class 1 railway company to switch from steam locomotives to diesel locomotives. On January 21, 1955, he took his first night shot of the route in Waynesboro, Virginia . On May 29, 1955, the railway company announced that it now wanted to switch completely to diesel locomotives. Link's photos were unintentionally used to document the end of steam traction in the United States. He visited the N&W routes in Virginia around 20 times and made a total of 2,400 recordings by 1960.

Link took the photos at his own expense, but was assisted by N&W President Robert Hall Smith and other employees. In addition to the locomotives, he photographed the N&W railway workers in their daily work as well as life in the communities along the railway lines. The photos were precisely aligned and were mostly taken at night. Link justified this with the fact that he could then choose the optimal lighting, while the sun was usually not in the right place.

Other photographers like Philip Hastings and Jim Shaughnessy also took similar night shots. Link, however, used new techniques for flash photography in order to be able to photograph larger objects. For the photo "Hotshot Eastbound ( Iaeger, West Virginia )" he used 42 flashbulbs No. 2 and a No. 0 which were ignited at the same time. Together with his assistant, he set up the technology, connecting it in series so that even a single malfunction prevented the taking of a photo. Another difficulty was that Link could only guess at the correct release position of the moving train at night. Link used a 4x5 view camera with black and white film. From these he then made the silver gelatine photos. In addition to the black and white night photos, Link also took day photos of the only passenger train on the Abingdon branch line of the N&W. Most of his color photos were also taken along this route. The photo “Maud bows to the Virginia Creeper (Green Cove, Virginia)” is available in black and white and color.

Between 1957 and 1977 he made sound recordings in addition to the photos, which he published under the title "Sounds of Steam Railroad". Link was quickly known among railway fans from the end of the 1950s due to his publications in Trains, among others . He achieved further fame beyond these circles from 1983 through a traveling exhibition.

Next life

Link continued to work as an advertising photographer from 1960 until he retired in 1983. During this time he made a. a. Photos of the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and New York Harbor . After retiring, he lived in South Salem, Westchester County , New York.

Link's second wife, Conchita, was arrested in 1996 and later convicted for stealing photos from Link's collection and trying to sell them. She alleged that Link allegedly suffered from Alzheimer's disease and that she had therefore received guardianship through Link. After she was released from prison after six years, she tried again to sell the stolen photos. She was then sentenced again to three years. She was also accused of locking Link up. However, this allegation did not come to trial.

In 2000, some of Link's friends in Roanoke, Virginia began planning a museum to display Link's works, especially his railroad photographs. Link died in January 2001 while the museum was being planned. In 2004, the Roanoke museum opened in the former Norfolk and Western Railway station.

Adaptation in Germany

In 1992 the book "Steam, Steel and Stars" was published in a German licensed edition by Weltbild-Verlag and made Links Fotos known to a broad German-speaking audience.

Exhibitions with original prints took place in the Museum der Arbeit Hamburg in 2008 and in the Kunst Galerie Fürth in 2010.

In 2000 the boogie-woogie pianist Axel Zwingenberger published his book Vom Zauber der Zug. The illustrated book contains color photos that Zwingenberger made in the nineties during special steam train trips in Germany in the style of O. Winston Link.

literature

• O. Winston Link: Night Trick on the Norfolk and Western Railway . Photographers Gallery, National Museum of Photography, National Railway Museum, London 1983, ISBN 0-907879-02-0 .
• O. Winston Link: Ghost Trains . railroad photographs of the 1950s. Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia 1983, ISBN 0-940744-43-0 .
• O. Winston Link: Steam, Steel & Stars . Harry N. Abrams, New York 1987, ISBN 0-8109-1645-2 .
• O. Winston Link: Steam, Steel & Stars. America's last steam trains (German licensed edition) . Weltbild, Augsburg 1992, ISBN 3-89350-521-0 .
• O. Winston Link: The Last Steam Railroad in America . from Tidewater to Whitetop. Harry N. Abrams, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8109-3575-9 .
• Tom Garver: O. Winston Link . the Man and the Museum. O. Winston Link Museum, Roanoke, Virginia 2004, ISBN 0-9710531-4-6 .
• Ben Dulaney: Flash bulb artist photographs the Norfolk and Western . In: Norfolk and Western Magazine . 1956, p. 580-583 .
• Thomas H. Garver: Railroad photographs of O. Winston Link . In: American Art Review . tape 12 , no. 5 , 2000, pp. 202-207 .
• Malcolm Jones: The most beautiful trains in the world . In: Preservation . tape 51 , no. 6 , 1999, p. 30-38 .
• Anthony Korner: The Night Owl . In: Artforum International . tape 27 , 1989, pp. 141-146 .
• David Morgan: The mixed train: photography by O. Winston Link . In: Trains . Kalmbach Publishing, Milwaukee July 1957, p. 31-43 .
• David Morgan: Steam after dark . In: Trains . Kalmbach Publishing, Milwaukee November 1957, p. 30-43 .
• David E. Oughterbridge: Chugging to Extinction . In: Connoisseur . tape 219 , no. 935 , 1989, pp. 122-127 .

Web links

• O. Winston Link Museum
• www.carolinaarts.com: The photographs of O. Winston Link
• www.spikesys.com: The works of O. Winston Link
• Karin Schulze: Photo show "Trainspotting". A feast for the eyes for puffer kissers. In: Culture. Spiegel Online , April 24, 2008, accessed on January 19, 2020 : "Links Locomotives are groundbreaking - and art." 
• Exhibition "Steam and Steel" in the Kunst Galerie Fürth 2010

Individual evidence

1. ^ Photo: Hot Shot, Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956
2. ↑ The photo was also based on an episode of the Simpsons series . Comparison between the link's photo and the Simpsons interpretation ( memento of the original from June 30, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Photo: Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole ( Memento of the original from September 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ Ghost Trains . An aperture of 11 to 16 was used with an exposure of 1/200 sec.
5. ↑ Photo: Maud bows to the Virginia Creeper ( Memento of the original from September 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ^ Steam, Steel & Stars. America's last steam trains, see under "Literature"
7. ↑ www.spiegel.de: Photo show “Trainspotting” in the Museum of Labor Hamburg 2008
8. ^ Exhibition "Steam and Steel" in the Kunst Galerie Fürth 2010
9. ↑ Axel Zwingenberger: From the magic of trains , YES / NO Musikverlag Ahrensburg near Hamburg, ISBN 3-926398-02-7