O Winston Link - Midnight Special
O Winston Link an American photographer best known for his photographs of the Norfolk and Western steam locomotives. Taken between 1955 and 1960 these images document the last years of the large steam powered engines. Link approached the management of the N&W line and offered to take the images for free if he was allowed full access to capture the images.
Link preferred shooting at night and developed his own techniques for lighting such large subjects. 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." During this time he produced 2,400 well crafted images that only began to receive recognition in the 1980s. His images have been published in two books "Steam, Steel and Stars, 1987" and "The Last Steam Railroad in America, 1995"
His collection is housed at the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia.
