I confess this post doesn’t sound promising. It is about O. Winston Link, a little-known photographer who specialized in photographing steam trains. But stay with me - it’s a fascinating story for any photographer and further testimony to the power of photography to break free of categorization. I’d never heard of Link before seeing a small exhibition of his photographs at The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. This got me interested and I started to research his work. As well as being technically fascinating, his photographs are a remarkable document of the interaction between technology and the rural environment. Anyone who has ridden American trains will know that even today many lines go right through the centre of small towns which came to depend on the rail link. The intimacy of the relationship between the railroads and settlements is much greater than has been the case in the UK and it is this relationship that Link seems to have spotted and portrayed so well. Link's lighting rigs Link made a name for himself by photographing steam trains just at the point they were being phased out, lugging huge self-designed lighting rigs around the hills of Appalachia in search of old locomotives passing through towns, past houses, stores, swimming pools and interacting at many levels with rural human settlements. H e started shooting the trains of the Norfolk & Western Line in 1955, one of the last routes for the steam engines that had provided the foundation for America ’ s economic ascendancy in the first half of the century. The company announced a few months later that it planned to shift to diesel and Link decided to document the last of the steam-powered trains. Link, a commercial photographer born in New York with an idealized vision of small-town America, made meticulously composed photographs which testify to his engineering training. He compositions could take hours and even days to set up