O. Winston Link
Winston Link was an American photographer born in Brooklyn, NY in 1914. He is best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading in the late 1950s. A commercial photographer, Link pioneered night photography.
While in Staunton, VA for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link’s longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. The N&W was the last major railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel power.
Link took his first night photograph of the railroad on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, VA. 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. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the railroad completed the transition to diesel.
Link’s images were always meticulously 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. For instance, the movie theater image Hotshot Eastbound (Iaeger, West Virginia), photographed in 1956, used 43 flashbulbs fired simultaneously. Link, with an assistant such as George Thom, had to lug all his equipment into position and wire it. This was done in a series so any failure would prevent a picture being taken at all; and in taking night shots of moving trains, the right position for the subject could only be guessed at.
A traveling exhibition in 1983 brought his work to a wider public as did Paul Yule’s award-winning documentary “Trains That Passed in the Night” (1990), in which Link re-visited the scenes of his classic photographs of the Norfolk and Western.
Winston Link was an American photographer born in Brooklyn, NY in 1914. He is best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading in the late 1950s. A commercial photographer, Link pioneered night photography.
While in Staunton, VA for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link’s longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. The N&W was the last major railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel power.
Link took his first night photograph of the railroad on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, VA. 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. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the railroad completed the transition to diesel.
Link’s images were always meticulously 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. For instance, the movie theater image Hotshot Eastbound (Iaeger, West Virginia), photographed in 1956, used 43 flashbulbs fired simultaneously. Link, with an assistant such as George Thom, had to lug all his equipment into position and wire it. This was done in a series so any failure would prevent a picture being taken at all; and in taking night shots of moving trains, the right position for the subject could only be guessed at.
A traveling exhibition in 1983 brought his work to a wider public as did Paul Yule’s award-winning documentary “Trains That Passed in the Night” (1990), in which Link re-visited the scenes of his classic photographs of the Norfolk and Western.
André Kertész was born in Budapest on July 2,1894. He graduated from the local Academy of Commerce in 1912 and subsequently worked as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange. It was during this time that he bought his first camera and spent his time photographing scenes from everyday life, often on the city’s streets. In 1914 he was drafted by the Austrian Hungarian army and sent to the front. He took his camera with him and took photos of his fellow soldiers. He was badly injured on the battlefield and underwent a long period of forced convalescence. Emerging from it in 1925, he went back to work at the stock exchange, as he was unable to support himself solely with his photography.
In the same year he moved to Paris, working as a freelance photographer and collaborating with various European journals, including Vu, Art et Medicine, and the Times. He took up residence in Montparnasse and became part of the artistic and literary circles, photographing artists such as Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Constantin Brancusi, and Alexander Calder. He also took shots of life on the city streets. His talent was soon recognized, and in 1927 he exhibited his photos in a solo exhibition at Au Sacre du Printemps gallery. In 1933, he made the now famous series of Distortions that adopted the visual language of Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, and Henry Moore. The following year he published his book Paris vu par André Kertész.
In 1936, along with his wife of three years, Elisabeth Saly, he moved to New York and worked for a year at Keyston Agency. The war prevented him from returning to Paris, so he continued working in the U.S., where he appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Coronet and showed in exhibitions at the PM Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. After a retrospective of his work at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, he became regarded as one of the leading figures of modern photography. Since then, his work has been shown widely throughout the world. Kertész wrote many books and monographs and died in New York on September 28, 1985.