Book Review, O Winston Link, The Last Steam Railroad in America

My rate of reading seems to be rapidly outstripping my rate of posting book reviews so I thought I would attempt a little bit of catchup. This is a book I picked up after Christmas and couldn't put down until it was read. I have always been a fan of steam power and I'm very lucky that I have the Bo'ness and Kinneil Steam Railway less than a mile away. I can go and stand on the footbridge over the tracks as the engines pass beneath to get my fix of that unique smell that combines, coal smoke, steam and steam oil!



The photos date back to the fifties but the book is from 1995, and the hardback edition I have was published by Harry N Abrams (HNA) from 2008, text is by Thomas Garver.

O Winston Link tends to be known for his black and white night images of steam trains but this book is so much more than this, being more of a social documentary of the period when steam gave way to diesel. I first came across the works of O Winston Link (the O stands for Ogle), b 1914 - d 2001, on a BBC Four documentary entitled "The Photographer, his Wife, her Lover", where they explored the controversy that arose around his wife exploiting print sales.
From wikipedia:

In 1996, Link's second wife, Conchita, was arrested for (and later convicted of) stealing a collection of Link's photographs and attempting to sell them, claiming that Link had Alzheimer's disease and that she had power of attorney. She served six years in prison. After being released, she again attempted to sell some of Link's works that she had stolen, this time using the Internet auction site eBay. She received a three-year sentence. Conchita was also accused of imprisoning her husband.

Setting aside this controversy, the photographs from this book are truly amazing. Firstly they are amazing because they show the Norfolk and Western Railway just before its conversion from steam over to diesel, the last railroad in the US to make that conversion and so catching an era in travel which is gone forever. Winston had the cooperation of the railway company and so enjoyed an unprecedented level of access. Here is a typical behind-the-scenes shot of the locomotives at the Shaffers Crossing coal bunkers:

Secondly the photographs are amazing because of the custom lighting rigs used to get many of the nighttime shots. This was before electronic flash guns and before wireless sync devices when the length of cables was measured in miles and the number of flash bulbs in the hundreds for one shot! The flash bulbs had to be carefully selected for how quickly they ignited and how long they would burn for.

And the results:

And finally the shots feature great composition, cutting across genres such as landscape and portraits to make an all encompassing social documentary.

Small web based images do not really do these images justice so I strongly recommend getting the book where the quality of reproduction is much higher.

Read more about O Winston Link on Wikipedia or at the O Winston Link Museum website.

See also a review of another great 50s photographer who also has a name starting with an initial, W Eugene Smith.