Story Behind the Gallery

The negatives from which these images were printed were almost destroyed! In the mid-1990s, O. Winston Link, his son Winston Conway Link, and friend Cindy Lasseigne were going through bundle after bundle of some of Link's non-Norfolk and Western 4x5 negatives that he had taken during his professional career. Link would remove one or two negatives from the bundle, hold them up to the light, then decide whether or not to keep the complete file. At the end of the day, weary of the task, Link was inclined to discard the negatives rather than continue examining all of them. Instead, he told his son to keep them--to go through them and "see if there's anything there."

Link's negatives were taken back to Louisiana by Conway and Cindy and safely stored. From time to time, they would remove a rubber-banded file of the 4x5s and examine a few of the negatives, then have one or two printed at a local professional lab. Not until 2002, the year before the year-long celebration of the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial, did Conway start thinking again of his dad's work in Louisiana in the 1930s.