"Vesuvius, Virginia"It's remarkable how often a picture I like was made in a place with a name that makes a perfect title. It's not that the name is literally descriptive of anything, it just somehow seems resonant.
Vesuvius was the location for a very different kind of photograh exactly fifty years ago: one of O. Winston Link's elaborately staged pictorial illustrations of the steam railroad's final days. See the middle picture here. Look carefully at the upper left corner of that picture, at the wooden brace above the gas pumps. It supports a kind of porch roof along the front of a building. That building is still there, as you can see in this picture, made from the tracks facing back to where Link's camera must have been.
6 comments:
Thanks for the picture and thanks for the link. I enjoyed looking at O Winston Link's pictures. Amazing work. I love steam trains. Grew up with them in my back yard in Yakima WA. E
This is a neat site! I look forward to seeing new posts and learning more as I go...
Link's most famous picture was taken from the back rows of a drive-in. Have you found that one and added it to your collection?
scott
Link's most famous picture was taken from the back rows of a drive-in. Have you found that one and added it to your collection?
scott
PS found it -- the Iaeger drive-in in Iaeger, WV. Ant "hotshot" freight is puffing past. The camera was in about the third row.
Scott,
I know of the picture and the title, but have not been able to find out whether anything is left of the theater. It is definitely no longer in operation.
I'd also be curious to know how the composite was done. A single exposure couldn't record the projected image on the screen and the heavily flash-lighted general scene. Also, a large format negative couldn't possibly have so much depth of field at the exposure that could record the screen. In fact 4x5 film from that era would be hard pressed to record a relatively frozen image of the airplane footage at all. Might have been a masked double negative print, or combination of two negatives stripped together, or an assembled multiple print re-photographed. All photo-manipulation techniques dating back to the 19th Century.
Google comes through:
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2005/december/indelible.php
The convertible belonged to Link.
The couple in the convertible each married somebody else, but remember the evening perfectly.
The F86 Sabrejet on the screen had to be printed in later.
scott
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