Trainspotting

O. Winston Link, who died Jan. 30 at the age of 86, was the best kind of artist. He not only developed his own unique style of photography -- creating instantly recognizable "Linkian" images in the same way a David Lynch film or a Walker Evans photograph will always reveal its maker's hand. Link was also a bona fide eccentric and iconoclast who brought his obsessions to bear on his art, which the pragmatic photographer never considered as "art" in the first place.

Link's obsession was the Train. Not train in the puny sense of a locomotive device bridging the distance from one place to another, but Train in the sense of the mighty, romantic, iconic American machine of industry and progress cutting a wide, majestic swath through the country -- a great metal beast that was sadly retreating into history with the rise of the diesel engine in the mid-1950s.

A Brooklyn boy who enjoyed a successful commercial photography career for more than 40 years in New York City, Link's avocation and intoxication was the power and presence of the steam railroad engine. He sought these out on drives down South to photograph the last steam railroad, the Norfolk and Western, which traveled at its northernmost point into Ohio, and down into North Carolina. Link's obsession beginning in 1955 was recording the line's dwindling days.

In later years, Link's personal mythology threatened to surpass his photographic legend when he accused his wife Conchita of holding him prisoner in their basement and stealing his work in a protracted battle that eventually led to the woman's imprisonment in 1996 for grand larceny.

Link's trains were like the plot device, hovering in the background of a novel, that comes to determine everything, or that pivotal childhood event that keeps cropping up in therapy and provides the key to a psyche. The trains in his photographs often pass unobserved in the background, glimpsed through a window in a Vesuvius, Va., general store, or seen in a wonderfully "subconscious" image in the midst of Hester Fringer's living room. Hester sits in her sensible shoes, a cat nestled on her lap, lost in a sea of chintz and braided rugs while her grandson George conducts his nightly ritual of waving to a passing train that moves outside the home's picture window like something in a cartoon thought-bubble above Hester's head.

Link not only captured the train as a constant fixture of the American small towns on the Norfolk-Western line. He captured the places and people who lived with the routine of the locomotive's schedule, underscoring his philosophy that the steam engine was a vital thread in the American tapestry. As an elderly widow on the N&W's route noted in one of the classic photographic imprints of Link's obsession, Steam, Steel & Stars, "I am never lonely, not with all the people and trains that pass by my front door day and night."

And Link captured that cozy solidarity, the sense of community and luster in small towns more often derided as dull and stagnant in the forward-moving American culture. Caught in Link's crosshairs, there was a sense of surreal mystery and enchantment that coated these small towns with an almost cinematic shimmer reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch's movie romances and later seen in Philip-Lorca diCorcia's or Shelby Lee Adams's work.

That immediately recognizable, hyper-real effect was achieved by Link's massive bursts of synchronized flash to invest his scenes with an uncanny glow. The train's metal carcass shimmers like a phosphorescent creature washed up on the moonlit shore while tiny men in overalls and greasy caps minister to its demands at each orderly station. Link shot primarily at night as a means of controlling the light in his images, creating gorgeous milky halos around figures and brilliant, cottony plumes of that mythic steam trailing behind the majestic machine. The images of teens at a swimming pool or drive-in theater, or a trio of elderly neighbors on a front porch with the ever-present steam engine passing behind have a model railroad quality, as if Link has succeeded in capturing this vanishing way of life by freezing it into a tableau vivant.

A nostalgia hound in his own time, seduced by a vanishing slice of America, Link's photographs have also become touchstones for contemporary retro-fetishists. Himself an anachronism, who chose to continue shooting his highly organized, staged and lit scenarios even as the larger photography community embraced the spontaneity and purportedly unstaged realism of street photography practiced by Robert Frank, Link was unappreciated in his own day, until museums re-discovered his work beginning in the 1980s. According to his assistant Thomas Garver, who accompanied Link on his trips down South, Link "had a passion for the usable past -- old buildings, old towns, old objects. He loved those things that were well and thoughtfully made and were mellow with use."