“Hawksvill Creek Swimming Hole, Luray, Virginia” is a 1956 photograph by O. Winston Link.

Tracking the railroad
O. Winston Link photos on exhibit

O. Winston Link’s photographs of the final years of steam railroading on the Norfolk & Western Railway are among the best records of this vanished form of transportation. Beginning in 1955, Link made more than 20 trips over a five-year period photographing the towns and countryside on the N&W line. The photographs are on display through Dec. 21 at the U.Va. Art Museum in an exhibit, “Steam Power: Railroad Photographs of O. Winston Link.”

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1914, Link worked as a commercial photographer. He displayed great skill in making industrial photographs that required special camera techniques and lighting effects. Link died in 2001, and his life and work is soon to be presented publicly in the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke.

A videotape, “Trains That Passed in the Night,” will be shown during the exhibition in the museum.

Thomas H. Garver, exhibition curator and organizing curator for the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, will give a talk Nov. 5 at 5:30 p.m. in Campbell Hall, Room 153.