Charles A. Hartman Fine Art is excited to present The Last Steam Railroad in America, a dramatic selection of images from the late O. Winston Link’s ambitious series of photographs that chronicle the final years of the Norfolk & Western Railway in the late 1950s. With these visual documents, Link set out to capture the obsolescence of the steam locomotive and, with it, the railroad towns, lifestyle and labor force that the train culture had supported. Not only did he pioneer new techniques in night photography to achieve great cinematic effect, he also released high-quality recordings of the fleeting sounds of the steam railroad.

Ogle Winston Link was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and died in South Salem, New York in 2001. As a teenager, he developed early interests in photography, storytelling, tools, locomotives and rail yards. Amid the depression era, Link graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a degree in civil engineering. Soon after, he took a job as a photographer for a public relations firm, an act that launched his lifelong career as a commercial photographer, and allowed him the means to finance his own fine art work. He didn’t attempt to exhibit this series until 1983, the same year he retired from advertising. The work has since been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe and in Japan and is present in numerous major museum collections around the world.