?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
O. WINSTON LINK (1914-2001) Train 16 Leaves Williamson * Coal Extra Working Upgrade at Blue Ridge Grade, East of Roanoke. Together, two ferrotyped silver prints, the images each measuring approximately 9 5/8x7 5/8 inches (24.4x19.4 cm.), and the reverse, the sheets slightly larger, each with Link's negative notation (NW 2024 and NW 1652), in pencil, and his OWL hand stamp, on verso. 1958
WITH--Two of Link's records documenting the last days of the steam locomotives on the Norfolk & Western train lines. The Fading Giant, Sounds of Steam Railroading Vol. 2 and Thunder on Blue Ridge, Sounds of Steam Railroading Vol. 3, each with a color reproduction of a Link photograph on the front. The second is signed and inscribed by Link, in 1980. Enclosed in the original mailing envelope with Link's Brooklyn address label and with four pieces of ephemera related to the recordings.
ALSO WITH--A color panoramic snapshot of Link standing in front of a train.
While in Staunton, Virginia, for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link's longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. N&W was the last major (Class I) railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel motive power. Link took his first night photograph of the road on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, Virginia. On May 29, 1955 the N&W announced its first conversion to diesel and Link's work became a documentation of the end of the steam era. He returned to Virginia for approximately 20 visits to continue photographing the N&W, taking his last shot in 1960. That year the road completed the transition to diesel, by which time he had accumulated 2400 negatives on the project.
Link's images were meticulously set up and posed, and he chose to take most of his railroad photographs at night. He said "I can't move the sun — and it's always in the wrong place — and I can't even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting." Link's vision required him to develop new techniques for flash photography of such large subjects.
In addition to photographing them, Link was also making sound recordings of the trains, which he issued on a set of six gramophone records between 1957 and 1977 under the overall title Sounds of Steam Railroading. In the railfan world he was probably best known by these, and by photographs published in Trains magazine and elsewhere in the 1950s, which inspired others to follow his example.
