Tracking Shots

Before the advent of the superhighway—or the not-so-super highway, like the Long Island Expressway, which is purgatory in the summer—the railways were the ties that bind. How appropriate, then, that steam engines have been documented by a photographer named O. Winston Link. A railroad buff himself (Link spent twenty years restoring an engine), he took his first train shot in 1955 while on a commercial assignment from Westinghouse. Over the next five years Link covered some 2,500 miles of track along the Norfolk and Western Railway line, completing 2,200 pictures. He also brought along recording equipment to capture the sounds of the trains—and has put out six records. Link photographed his last steam engine in 1960, but since then his work has enjoyed a growing audience. Last year he held an acclaimed show organized by the Akron Art Museum which traveled to the International Center of Photography, in New York, and this past spring he had a show in Paris.