2014 | C41

Winston Link

Winston Link (American, December 16, 1914–January 30, 2001) was a commercial photographer that helped establish rail photography as a hobby and push the limits of night photography. Today we celebrate him and his amazing work.

Link’s introduction to photography came at a young age from his father. He soon grew to love the art, and went on to work as a photo editor for his college newspaper at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he received his civil engineering degree.

After graduation in 1937, Link began to work at Carl Byoir’s public relations firm as a commercial photographer. He learned the advanced skills of a professional photographer while working at the firm over the following five years. During this period, he produced the photo Girl on Ice, which was featured in Life magazine as an example of the classic publicity photo. Link left Byoir to work at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory in 1942, taking photos of devices made for low-flying airplanes meant to detect submarines for World War II. This work lasted until the war’s end in 1945, at which time Link opened his own studio in New York in 1946. Just as with the work at Byoir, Link’s studio focused on public relations photos.

The focus of Link’s photography changed in 1955 due to his love of railroads. During a photography job, Link began to take photos of the Norfolk and Western Railway line. The N&W was one of the last railroads to switch from steam to diesel engines, leaving the company with some of the most advanced steam locomotives in the world. The railroad announced the transition to diesel in 1955, and Link’s photographs of some of the last steam engines served as a documentary of the passing of the steam locomotive era. By the completion of the transition in 1960, Link had taken about 2400 negatives over the course of 20 visits to the Virginia location of the railroad. Many of these images were taken at night as a way to control the lighting. This control was often achieved by large flashes, with his famous Hotshot Eastbound, a photo of a train running past a movie theater, requiring 42 #2 flashbulbs and a #0 flash. The night shots were taken in black-and-white, and the color shots taken at the N&W Abingdon branch. Link’s photos have been exhibited in such places as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke. The museum also handles Link’s work for his estate.

Source: http://www.artnet.com/artists/o-winston-link/

Photographer Jeanloup Sieff (1933-2000)

Born in Paris to Polish parents Jeanloup Sieff (1933 – 2000) began shooting fashion photography in 1956 and joined the Magnum Agency in 1958, which enabled him to travel extensively. Settling in New York for much of the sixties he worked for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle, photographing celebrities such as Jane Birkin, Yves Saint-Laurent, Rudolf Nureyev and Alfred Hitchcock amongst others. Sieff won numerous prizes including the Prix Niepce, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in Paris in 1981 and the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992, and his work is housed in many private and international collections.

Sieff is heralded as one of the great international photographic talents of the last half-century and has left an undeniable imprint on his generation. Prolific in many fields, the variety of his imagery highlights his broad artistry, ranging from fashion, nudes, landscape and portraiture.

With great tenacity, Sieff pursued a personal and highly effective signature style, soaked in playful imagination with a touch of irony. Seldom working in colour he favoured the discipline of black and white, often using to his advantage the spatial distortion of wide-angle lenses, the dramatic potential of shadow and exploitation of tone.

“I have always maintained that there is no such thing as art. There are only artists, producing things that give them pleasure, doing so under some compulsion, perhaps even finding the process painful, but deriving a masochistic joy from it!”, Jeanloup Sieff.

Stunning Tintypes from Sundance by Victoria Will

Every year, some extraordinary photographs and moments happen at The Sundance Film Festival. Photographer Victoria Will is no stranger to them, having covered the Festival for the past four years. In the past, Will has created straightforward (and stunning) photographs of celebrities in attendance, but this year, she decided to try something new—and also incredibly challenging.

Check out the complete image set on Esquire. Some of my favs below.