O. Winston Link, “Ghost Town, Stanley, VA, silver gelatin print, 1957 (courtesy Danziger Gallery)
Danziger Gallery
527 West 23rd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Friday through June 14, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm, free
212-629-6778
www.danzigergallery.com
In 1955, Brooklyn-born engineer and commercial photographer O. Winston Link began a five-year period in which he documented the last large steam-powered locomotives in America, granted special access by the president of the Norfolk & Western Railway. Primarily using a Graphic View 4×5 camera with custom-built flash equipment, Link took stunning nighttime shots of trains as they made their way through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, in carefully constructed tableaux that beautifully define 1950s America. Link served as a major influence on another Brooklyn-born photographer, Gregory Crewdson, whose own abilities at setting up cinematic scenes in large-scale pictures was detailed in the excellent 2012 documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson was so enamored of Link and his story that he brought him in to his Yale MFA class to talk to his students about his oeuvre; Crewdson is now taking part in a different kind of conversation with Link, called “American Darkness,” continuing at Chelsea’s Danziger Gallery through June 14.
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (RVS Automotive),” pigment print, 2007 (courtesy Danziger Gallery / Gagosian Gallery)
The show includes sixteen black-and-white photographs by Link primarily depicting trains chugging across a bridge over a swimming hole where kids are playing (“Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole,” Luray, Virginia, 1956), passing by a sign that boldly declares “Water” (“Highball for the Double Header,” Roanoke, Virginia, 1959), rumbling past a gas station where a couple in a convertible watches the attendant fill the tank (“Sometimes the Electricity Fails,” Vesuvius, Virginia, 1956), and speeding behind a drive-in movie theater where an onscreen airplane is seemingly flying right toward it (“NW1103 Hot Shot East Bound,” Laeger, West Virginia, 1954). The 16×20 or 20×16 silver gelatin prints, most of which feature ghostly plumes of smoke rising into the air, are accompanied by a trio of large-scale photos by Crewdson in the back room, works that echo Link’s pictures in mood, setting, and lighting, although Crewdson’s are far more stylized, like scenes from a movie that was never made. Railroad tracks can be seen fading off in the right side of “Untitled (Dispatch),” an unattainable escape route for a woman standing alone in a parking lot near a trio of taxis. A group of kids hang around central, horizontal tracks in a rural town in “Untitled (Railway Children).” And a man sits by himself on a street corner, with the clouds at the top of the photo reminiscent of steam from a train, in “Untitled (RBS Automotive).” Crewdson titled the show from a quote from Pauline Kael’s review of David Lynch’s 1986 film, Blue Velvet, in which she wrote, “This is American darkness — darkness in color, darkness with a happy ending.” That same kind of darkness permeates these photos, which reunite a pair of truly American artists who capture the spirit of the country in similar yet unique ways.