Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 63)

Night Fishing with Gas Flare 1955 on assignment for Westinghouse Air Conditioners, there were almost 20,000 diesel units plying the rails. Steam was finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the efficiency and lower maintenance required of the diesels. Within five years, the Northern & Western steam locomotives would be gone. After the photo shoot, he found himself with a bit of time on his hands, and, in his words: “A visit to the N&W station at nearby Waynesboro provided the inspiration to get into action, when N&W Train No. 2 approached the platform in all the glory that only a steam locomotive can provide. The following night I returned to this location and made my first night shot of a train in action. It was a success.” Over the next five years, Link stole time from his “bills-paying” New York commercial photography business and returned to Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland to document life along the railroad both in sound and on film. In his twenty self-financed trips south, Link produced six steam railroad sound recordings and approximately 2,400 negatives, both on 4 x 5 and 2 ¼ film, in color and black and white. Although most of Link’s film work was done at night, a substantial number, indeed hundreds of images, were taken during the day. O. Winston Link died on January 30, 2001. In August of that year, Salem Tamer and Winston Conway Link, trustees for the O. Winston Link Revocable Trust, signed the Link Museum Agreement which led to the creation of the O. Winston Link Museum located in the historic Norfolk & Western Passenger Station, in Roanoke, Virginia. High quality reproductions of Link’s N&W work can be found in Steam, Steel, and Stars (1987) with text by Tim Hensley and The Last Steam Railroad in America (1995) with text by Thomas H. Garver. The negatives from which some of these Louisiana images were printed were almost destroyed. In the mid1990s, O. Winston Link, his son Winston Conway Link, and friend Cindy Lasseigne were going through bundle after bundle of some of Link’s non-Norfolk and Western 4x5 negatives that he had taken during his professional career. Link would remove one or two negatives from the bundle, hold them up to the light, then decide whether or not to keep the complete file. At the end of the day, weary of the task, Link was inclined to discard the negatives rather than continue examining all of them. Instead, he told his son to keep them and “see if there’s anything there.” Link’s negatives were taken back to Louisiana and safely stored. In 2003, Winston Conway Link partnered with friends Dr. Mark Provenza and Dr. Kyle Barnett to form LouisianaLink L.L.C. for the purpose of researching, printing, and promoting O. Winston Link’s Louisiana work. LCV Winston Conway Link is O. Winston Link’s son and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and former interim chair of the Department of Mathematics at LSU-Shreveport. Selections from Link’s Louisiana series may be viewed and purchased at www.louisianalink.net. For more information on the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, log on to www.linkmuseum.org. Winter 2008-09/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 63 http://www.louisianalink.net http://www.linkmuseum.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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