A Happy Accident, Carefully Planned
GENIUS in photography often means a knack for being in the right place at the right time. For the commercial photographer and train buff O. Winston Link (1914-2001), that was Staunton, Va., in 1955. Having traveled there on assignment from his home in New York to photograph window air-conditioners for Westinghouse, he took a side trip to nearby Waynesboro, a stop on the last large steam-powered railroad in America, the Norfolk & Western. Over the next five years, until the railroad completed its conversion to diesel-powered engines, Link made more than 20 trips to Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, producing more than 2,400 images of Norfolk & Western trains, stations and related sites.
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Chewing Gum, Plaster Bellies and Other Sculptural Byways
The history of art is always growing, but this year has brought some especially outstanding expansions. New York has been the beneficiary of two large exhibitions of Latin American modernism, a revelatory presentation of early Modernist photography from Central Europe and a survey of the paintings of Richard Pousette-Dart, an artist previously lost in the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
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Photographs, Art and Lessons, Taken From a Life Cut Short
In the summer of 1993 Dan Eldon, a 22-year-old photographer for Reuters, was making his way through the streets of Mogadishu to the suspected headquarters of a Somali warlord where scores of people had just been killed in a bombing by United Nations forces. There, amid the rubble, he and three other journalists were set upon by an enraged mob and stoned to death.
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