Feature Articles


July Issue 1999

Three Exhibits At Waterworks Visual Arts Center

The Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, will offer three exhibitions which will be on view through July 25, 1999. The three exhibits include, O. Winston Link: Memories and Machines, a recollection of a by-gone era, is an outstanding exhibition which includes 30 large-scale photographs. In the 40 years since O. Winston Link began to methodically document the last days of the mighty steam engines, the impact of his work is finally being realized, not only as a romantic visual record of vanishing machinery but also as a record of a vanishing small-town American. Are My Labors In Vain? Spencer Shops and the African American Experience, is a mixed media exhibition which documents memories of another kind in small-town America, the history of African American workers at Spencer Shops. Justin Eller, a recent graduate of East Rowan High School will also exhibit his artwork in the Young People's Gallery.

O. Winston Link is renowned for his dramatic black and white and color photographs which capture the last days of steam rail-roading on the Norfolk & Western. A New York photographer, Link fell under the spell of the great steam engines during a visit to Virginia in the 1950s at a time when Norfolk & Western was converting its steam engines, the last in the country, to diesels.

Over the next five years, he returned to the region many times using intricate cameras, dramatic lighting, synchronized flash, and high contrast to create both dramatic nighttime photographs (black and white only) and charming color photos of scenes of rural life in Virginia and North Carolina towns. Nostalgic scenes of doubleheaded engine link-ups of coal trains on the Blue Ridge, smoke pluming from engines in the cold weather and pictures of freight and passenger day trains are included in this original exhibition which was organized by the William A. King Regional Arts Center in Abingdon, Virginia. Between Jan. 21, 1955 and May 1960, Link made hundreds of photographs of steam railroad engines. He created an unprecedented document of the trains, small towns and farms lining the tracks, railroad workers and nearby residents. Many critics consider this body of work emblematic of the 20th century.

Link worked with a large format plate camera and multiple banks of flashbulbs to create these photographs, most of which were done at night. Link made more than twenty trips to Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. He would arrive in a small town, his Buick convertible filled with photography equipment and would gather a crew of townspeople to help him string the hundreds of yards of wiring to connect the banks of flashbulbs to the main power supply. During one exposure, he could fire up to sixty flash-bulbs simultaneously, creating an enormous burst of light.

Link worked on his own, and he financed this entire project himself. The Norfolk and Western Railroad provided support by allowing Link access to N&W property and giving him a special key to open the telephone boxes that communicated with the railroad's dispatchers. Link would recruit townspeople as actors to play roles appearing in the photographs. When camera, film, lights, and actors were ready, Link, his assistant, and local cast would await the arrival of the central component of the image, the steam locomotive and its train.

Link's dramatic depictions document the heroic quality of the railroads as the era of the steam locomotive passed and the automobile emerged to dominate American culture. These powerful photographs were not shown in a museum exhibition until 1983, twenty-eight years after the start of the project.

Are My Labors In Vain?, acknowledges that the passage of a way of life can be bittersweet and that nostalgia, untempered by truth, can be deceiving. For African Americans in North Carolina, during the years after slavery and reconstruction, segregation became the law of the land. Outside of the farm, opportunities for employment were few. Jobs in the textile and furniture industries remained closed to blacks; work as laborers in the lumber industry, naval stores. and on the railroads were traditional "Negro jobs." Employed as laborers at Spencer Shops, African Americans were not allowed to practice a skilled trade in competition with white workers. Are My Labors In Vain? is a collection of photographs, memorabilia, and video interviews of African Americans who worked in the Shops during Jim Crowism and the heyday of the mighty steam engines.

For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the center at 704/636-1882.

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