{"id":2797,"date":"2014-01-22T20:44:36","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T20:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=2797"},"modified":"2014-01-27T20:20:50","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T20:20:50","slug":"trains-that-passed-in-the-night-how-photographer-o-winston-link-told-a-classic-american-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=2797","title":{"rendered":"“Trains That Passed in the Night” — How photographer O. Winston Link told a classic American story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0 \"train\u00a0\u201cHot Shot Eastbound,\u201d\u00a0Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956.\u00a0All photos \u00a9 W. Conway Link<\/em><\/p>\n

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Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link,<\/i><\/strong> running through April 27 at the Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway, The Milwaukee School of Engineering.<\/p>\n

Thomas Garver understands O. Winston Link as a kind of genius who \u201cseduced\u201d viewers with the romance of billowing smoke, thundering pistons, and clattering train tracks. The analogy is apt given Link\u2019s background as a commercial photographer, says the curator of the new exhibit, Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link,<\/i> which runs through April 27 at the Grohmann Museum, which collects and exhibits \u201cindustrial art.\u201d<\/p>\n

The museum\u2019s holdings are built around its Man at Work<\/i> collection of depictions of human labor and industry, in primarily paintings, mosaics, stained glass and large-scale bronze figure sculptures, some of which adorn the museum\u2019s roof \u00a0like heroic, larger-than-life gargoyles or, if you prefer, cathedral saints. Museum director James Keiselberg welcomes the Link photography as a complement to the museum\u2019s more traditional media.<\/p>\n

Link dealt with a historic American subject in new technological means, for the 1950s. He also instinctively plumbed the dark side of the American experience by taking the radical step of shooting most of his train photos at night. These 36 black-and-white prints — documenting the final days of the steam-powered railroad on the Norfolk & Western Railway — evoke film noir. He used large, cumbersome tripod cameras with flashbulbs, and developed his exquisitely detailed images as gelatin silver prints in dark rooms, using beds of liquid developing solution for the exposed print, a \u201cstop bath,\u201d a fixer bath, etc. and mechanical enlargers. In an era of instant digital photography with \u201csmart phones,\u201d all these arcane techniques seem to risk extinction, like the steam locomotive, Garver notes.<\/p>\n

Link also\u00a0recorded locomotive\u00a0sound effects\u00a0and filmed this passing railroad\u00a0environment —\u00a0part of a\u00a0documentary\u00a0film for British television. Garver describes Link\u2019s\u00a0actual footage\u00a0as \u201cvery atmospheric and romantic.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Link\u2019s advertising-style \u201cseduction,\u201d brings the viewer \u201cinto the scene which includes the trains, but only as part of the total ensemble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or think of a director\u2019s seduction, in a classic American noir film like Double Indemnity. <\/i>Here, the murderous threat seems submerged — but not a sense of something dying. What\u2019s passing is the locomotive Iron Horse, and the way of life it helped build across America.<\/p>\n

Link\u2019s \u201censemble\u201d involved locals as closely directed players, in elaborate setups and lighting, and exquisite timing. His famous 1956 photo \u201cHot Shot Eastbound,\u201d (top) blends mediums of transport and entertainment, life and death, romance and tragedy — muffled by the train powering by, as an airplane screams across a movie-screen sky. A young couple in a convertible enjoys a drive-in movie as a train hurtles past into darkness.<\/p>\n

\"river<\/p>\n

Link seductively downplays tragedy, complicit with the enjoyment amid such \u201cpassages.\u201d In \u201cHawksbill Creek Swimming Home\u201d (above) river bathers frolic with a rather American disregard of fatefulness. Link creates a zig-zag interplay of angles — the current\u2019s ominously black flow, the starkly backlit hill, the skeletal causeway and — in that instant — the train above, like a hell-bound or heaven-sent messenger, depending on your viewpoint.<\/p>\n

Included are some daylight train photographs, with their own visual poetry. Link\u2019s magic invariably seems to emanate from the smokestack\u2019s cloud dance.\u00a0And in one of the daylight photos he manages to capture the passage of an even older means of transportation. What is most striking about \u201cMaud Bows to the Virginia Creeper\u201d (1956, below) \u00a0is the horse-drawn carriage waiting in the foreground, beside a small train station in Green Cove, Virginia.<\/p>\n

\"horse<\/p>\n

Because the rail traversed 55 mountainous and treacherous miles from southwestern Virginia into western North Carolina, the train only ran during daylight hours. However, the head of the elegantly powerful white Maud is bowed, as if she is acquiescing to the propulsive black power of the Iron Horse, surging into the same foreground. The animal instinctively conveys a delicate poignance in the historical moment, intensified by the depth of field, which the train is quickly consuming.<\/p>\n

Link was an American original, striving to capture something that was disappearing from the vast panorama that formed the indigenous identity of America. In this sense, he is a kindred spirit to Edward Curtis, who also went to extraordinary lengths, to photographically document the American Indian and the passing of his way of life in his native habitat — during the transformative and often tragic advent of the white man. The Museum of\u00a0Wisconsin\u00a0Art in West Bend recently closed an exhibit of Curtis\u2019 work (which this blog covered extensively, starting with this review at:https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=2133<\/a>).<\/p>\n

As Curtis did commercial portraiture to survive, Link did advertising photography for The Saturday Evening Post<\/i> and various technical publications, but trains were his passion, as a subject.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was created as a work of passion and belief; that he set out to help in the preservation of a vanishing technology, in the manner he understood best, which was photography,\u201d Garver says.<\/p>\n

Link helps us to understand that with fresh eyes, to peer into the captured night, into the steam railroad\u2019s fast-changing times and implicitly into ours.<\/p>\n

The Grohmann\u00a0Museum hours are 9 AM to 5 PM Monday- Friday, Noon-6 PM Saturday, 1-4 PM Sunday. Parking is available east of the Museum at the corner of Milwaukee and State streets. 414-277-2300 Website:\u00a0<\/em>www.msoe.edu\/museum<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A shorter version of this review was published in The Shepherd Express.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cHot Shot Eastbound,\u201d\u00a0Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956.\u00a0All photos \u00a9 W. Conway Link   Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link, running through April 27 at the Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway, The Milwaukee … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-J7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2797"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2822,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2797\/revisions\/2822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}