THE MARVELLOUS MR LINK

BY LYNN HILDITCH LRPS

Last night (4th January 2006) BBC4 screened Paul Yule’s fascinating documentary The Photographer, His Wife and Her Lover focusing on the bizarre and longwinded court case between the American photographer O. Winston Link and his wife Conchita. The case resulted in his wife being jailed for fraud and theft of Link’s work to sell for her own gain. However, besides the controversy which sadly surrounds his photographic career, Link created some of the most stunning and technically ingenuous black and white photographs of the 20th Century and has been described by John Szarkowski, former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as “One of nature's noble men, and a legitimate American genius and nut.” .

Ogle Winston Link was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1914. He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic where he studied Civil Engineering. His interest in photography began with his father, a public school teacher and craftsman, who introduced his son to the technical side of the medium. Link’s interest and knowledge in technology resulted in the building of his own enlarger while he was still at High School. After graduating he worked for the public relations agency Carl Byior and Associates as a photographer for five years before leaving in 1942 to work for a laboratory run by Columbia University which was doing secret war research. The lab, located in Long Island, New York, backed up to the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. Link had begun photographing steam trains in Jersey City when he was 14 year old but had been unable to photograph them at this time due to the strict wartime censorship. He also realized that the major problem in photographing steam trains was getting the lighting correct. As Link once said, “You can't move the sun, and you can't even move the tracks, so you have to do something else to better light the engines.”

N&W 2nd at Luray (1956)

Following the war, Link became a freelance photographer. However, through connections he had made at Byior with contacts such as Texaco, American Petroleum Institute, and B. F. Goodrich, he received work documenting industrial processes. As with his photographs of steam trains, Link found these dark factory scenes extremely difficult to photograph because they required great lighting skill.

In 1955, Link went to Staunton, Virginia, to take photographs of an air conditioning factory. He knew that the Norfolk & Western Railway, passing through nearby Waynesboro, was the last large American railroad to operate exclusively with steam power. He returned the next night with his flash equipment and, with the cooperation of the station agent, made his first photograph of the N&W at night. The photograph was so successful that Link sent a print to the Public Relations Department of the railroad, asking permission to photograph the railroad and its workers. Link made about 20 trips to the N&W's tracks in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland over the next few years, producing about 2,400 images - most of them on sheets of 4x5 film with a Graphic View Camera.  The resolution and quality from this type of equipment was excellent allowing him to capture intricate mechanical detail. However, dieselization meant that Link had to work quickly as one division after another converted to diesel power.

What makes Link unique is that most of his photographs were taken at night using large, homemade lights and flash equipment to illuminate the scene because he wanted to be able to control as much of it as possible. One of the particular skills he brought to these night time railroad photographs was his background as a civil engineer, enabling him to capture speeding locomotives in a way never accomplished before. Earlier, large-scale night time photographs had been made using "open flash" flashbulbs, in which the camera's shutter was opened, the flashbulbs fired, and the shutter closed. This process worked only if nothing in the photo was moving, but with the equipment Link built, he could stop the motion of a train moving at 60 miles an hour. Link had special flash reflectors built, one of which could hold up to 18 bulbs, for lighting huge areas. He used a power supply which could fire 60 flashbulbs at once, along with the shutters of three cameras, all perfectly synchronized. The flash unit's cameras and power supply were connected by wires, and Link carried thousands of feet of it in a trailer towed behind his car. Some photographs could take from several hours to six days to set up, and there was only one opportunity to get the shot as the train sped by.

Link was particularly interested in capturing the interaction between people in their environments and the railroad and combined the two to create unique pieces of Americana. Nadia Marks describes Link’s images as “Everyday scenes, everyday lives, but always with the same backdrop of the massive steam locomotives that passed through these towns”. Probably his signature photograph is "Hotshot Eastbound," shot at a drive-in movie theater in Iaeger, West Virginia in 1956.

Hot Shot East Bound at Iaeger, West Virginia (1956)

The last of the N&W's steam locomotives were taken out of service in May, 1960, and Winston returned to New York to continue his work as a commercial and industrial photographer. He first became known for his high quality sound recordings of steam locomotives, releasing the first of six recording, "Sounds of Steam Railroading," in 1957, years before his N&W photographs became recognised. It was only in 1983 that his photographs began to receive credit as works of art.

Link & Assistant with Night Flash Equipment (1956)

Whether you believe the allegations made in the documentary that Link was a schizophrenic manic depressive who held grudges towards anyone who upset him, or that he was a racist and wife beater, or a manipulator who took revenge on his wife by accusing her of stealing his prints, or a weak invalid who was held captive in the basement his own home by his wife in order to make hundreds of prints for her to sell, what we do know is that Link was an artistic genius who created some of the most stunning black and white images and pieces of Americana of the 20th Century.

O. Winston Link died of a heart attack outside a railway station on 30th January 2001 aged 83 – a poetic ending to a colourful life.

Sources:
Paul Yule, “The Photographer, His Wife and Her Lover”, BBC4, 4th January 2006.
Nadia Marks, “Steamy Passion”, RPS Journal, Volume 145, Number 8, October 2005.
The O. Winston Link Museum website at www.linkmuseum.org

Please send any comments to Lynn