Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 12, 1994 TAG: 9404120110
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BARRY MEIER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FOR O. Winston Link, the hard-won fruits of his artistic dream have turned unexpectedly bitter. Rumors have been swirling through the art world for some time that the 79-year-old Brooklyn-born photographer, whose celebrated nighttime images of steam engines and railroad towns hang in museums worldwide, is suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
But a recent courtroom battle depicted him as a different kind of victim. It painted him as the central figure in a remarkable tale involving charges of betrayal, physical abuse and the theft of some 2,000 photographic prints; these prints, worth an estimated $2.5 million, are still missing.
The photographs date from the late 1950s, when Link roamed the Shenandoah Valley and Appalachian Mountains, documenting the last days of steam locomotion. His work lay undiscovered for more than two decades, until he was 68, but what was shaping up as an artistic fairy tale dissolved into a gothic brew of ambition, intrigue and passion.
Museum curators have hailed Link's black-and-white images - of people splashing in a stream, sitting on a porch or relaxing at a drive-in movie, all with a locomotive steaming by - as icons of a small-town America that faded with the photographer's flashbulbs.
His work has been compared to that of luminaries like Timothy H. O'Sullivan, the 19th-century American who photographed the Western frontier.
``He may be the tail end of a line of original photographers who dealt with the commercial and industrial world with a real passion,'' said John Szarkowski, the former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, which owns some of his works.
Even by the standards of other recent battles over the competency or the estates of cultural figures like Sir Rudolph Bing, Salvador Dali and Willem de Kooning, Link's case is bizarre. Interviews, trial records and testimony indicate that Link's second wife, Conchita, tried to usurp his artistic legacy by telling gallery owners that his mental health had failed.
The missing prints may turn up on the black market and could be difficult to identify, because popular photographs often exist in dozens of copies.
``She had cut me off and taken over control of my money and everything,'' Link said of Conchita, whom he divorced last year. ``Her signature had become my signature. I didn't exist. She was preparing to become me.''
Neither Conchita Link nor Edward R. Hayes, her co-defendant in the trial, responded to requests for interviews about it. In pretrial testimony, Conchita Link presented herself as a diligent wife who had managed the photographer's ascent from obscurity, raising the value of his photographs tenfold. She also charged that Link repeatedly beat her, a claim he denied.
``Winston Link was made and created by me as an international famous person,'' she testified. ``I created this man.''
In a recent conversation in Roanoke, where he is recuperating from heart bypass surgery at the home of a friend, the photographer proved mentally alert and both charming and combative, dismissing those who annoy him as ``bastards.''
Squat and balding, he is fond of hamburger joints, likes to wear an engineer's cap, and can explain how locomotives work. But once, when introduced to the actress Diane Keaton - who, like the director Steven Spielberg, collects his work - he had no idea who she was. Szarkowski has described him as a ``legitimate American genius and nut.''
O. Winston Link, who was married briefly in the 1940s and has a son from that marriage, married Conchita Mendoza in December 1984, at a symbolic spot, a general store in Green Cove, Va., that was the setting for several of his photographs.
He had been fascinated with trains since his youth. But it was not until the mid-1950s that he contacted Norfolk and Western Railway officials, after learning of their plans to phase out steam engines, and proposed taking pictures along the line's 2,500 miles of track at his own expense.
``I knew the engines would be gone, and once they were, the scenery would be gone too,'' Link said. ``People loved the railroad. Everyone treated it like their property.''
The project was a labor of love. Whenever possible, Link made the 600-mile trip from New York to Roanoke in a 1952 Buick, pulling a trailer filled with large-format cameras and lighting equipment.
Although he took some pictures during the day, he was drawn to the night. In the early 1950s, Link had developed ways to take nighttime photographs by using large arrays of up to 60 flashbulbs. Now he used that technique and orchestrated every event to produce surreal and cinematic photographs. Flashes created pools of light, local residents posed as models, and thanks to friendships he developed with engineers, locomotives rolled by on cue.
``While other people were with their wives and kids at Christmas, Winston was out making photographs,'' recalled Tom Garver, a free-lance curator who once worked as Link's assistant. ``His family at that point were the people on the railroad.''
Half a dozen years later, Link returned to commercial work, but his life continued to revolve around trains. In 1960, he bought an old engine to restore. And from his Manhattan studio, he supplied sound recordings and photographs to railroad buffs.
Then, in the early 1980s, just as curators were beginning to discover him, he met a tall woman with dark hair and eyes who was some 20 years his junior, when she made inquiries about property he owned in South Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County. A few years later, they would marry.
``Everything I did, I did myself,'' he said. ``I didn't realize how sick I was of it until somebody came up and said, `I can help you.' ''
Tomorrow: Bizarre events began soon after the wedding.
by CNB