Black & White, Like a Photograph

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The New York Sun

“The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover,” a documentary film produced and directed by Paul Yule, is either about a betrayed husband’s act of personal vengeance, in which the creaky machinery of the criminal justice system was used to imprison an innocent woman for the better part of a decade, or about a dame who is a superlative liar. But first you have to know about O. Winston Link, the photographer.

John Szarkowski, the former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called O. Winston Link “… one of nature’s noble men, and a legitimate American genius and nut.” In his day job, Link (1914–2001) was a successful commercial and industrial photographer with a studio in Manhattan. But in the 1950s, a confluence of interests launched him on the project that would make him world famous: documenting the end of the era of steam locomotives. Over a five-year period, he made about 20 trips to Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, and produced approximately 2,400 images.

There are two distinguishing characteristics of Link’s photographs. The first is that they are not just pictures of trains, but illustrations of the way the railroad was entwined with the lives of the people who lived along the tracks. One of Link’s specialties in his commercial work was showing how his customers’ products were used in everyday situations, and he put his talent at creating tableaux vivants to work on an enormous scale with his train pictures.

The second characteristic was his technical brilliance. A graduate of Manual Arts High School and Polytechnic Institute, both in Brooklyn, Link devised complex lighting systems that let him synchronize hundreds of single-use flashbulbs so he could shoot his pictures dramatically at night.

For three decades, these wonderful photographs stayed in a drawer; it was not until 1983 that museums began to show Link’s work. Four years later, a book featuring his photos titled “Steam, Steel, and Stars” introduced him to a wider audience. The book coincided with the rapid development of the market for photographic prints, a phenomenon centered in SoHo and other art pockets of New York City.

It had long been possible for talented photographers like Alfred Steiglitz to attract critical acclaim, and the mid-century rise of mass-market photographic magazines let photojournalists like W. Eugene Smith acquire huge followings.But it wasn’t until the latter decades of the 20th century that photographers could make big bucks selling individual prints. Enter Conchita Mendoza, the wife.

Link had been married and divorced early on, and after a long bachelorhood, he married 48-year-old Conchita in 1983 at age 73. Conchita was attractive, vivacious, and, it turned out, a terrific saleswoman for Winston’s prints.

Everyone interviewed in “The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover” agrees that at the time of the marriage, Winston was gaga over Conchita, who, they also agree, flogged the hell out of Link’s prints, getting ever increasing prices for them from reputable dealers. Life-long friends of Link’s agree that he could be a difficult, eccentric, vindictive man. And it is a matter of public record that the couple was divorced in the early 1990s, and soon afterward Conchita was tried and convicted of stealing 1,400 prints worth well over $1 million.

The lover, Edward Hayes, restored steam locomotives, and Link had approached him in the mid-1980s to work on a locomotive he had bought. Edward met Conchita.In describing how they became sexually involved, Conchita says on film, “Some things happen.” Hayes, in a separate interview, says, “Things happen.”This is the language of moral cretins: They expect us to believe that Cupid’s arrows so transfixed their hearts that they were will-less, unable not to betray Link.Mr. Hayes also did jail time for his involvement in the theft of the photographs.

Narrating the film, Mr. Yule tells us the case against Conchita is not “black and white, like a photograph.”When Conchita’s lawyer, Brittany Kilpatrick, insists it was her client who was wronged, and that it is “incredible” that such a miscarriage of justice should occur in America, Mr. Yule adds gratuitously that perhaps it happened “because it is America.”

“The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover” is structured to make the audience doubt the jurors’ verdicts.There is a certain amount of obfuscation.

Having already made a documentary about Link in 1990 called “Trains That Pass in the Night,” Mr. Yule has footage of the photographer at work, and of Conchita when things were still lovey-dovey. He says Link’s photographs are “romantic” and “innocent,” which we are not to understand as compliments. He also makes Conchita the dominant presence in the film, continually cutting back to an extended interview in which she claims to be a victim of her husband’s brutality and his “Park Avenue” lawyers. Her black hair now gray, she is nonetheless a strong presence. She speaks intelligently, weeps, recalls her early affection for Link, and insists the prints she and Mr. Hayes tried to sell anonymously on eBay were not stolen, but given to him by Link.

When the lights came up at the Film Forum after the preview screening, the women around me were unanimous that Conchita was a woman wronged.

I spoke with Robert Mann, a gallery dealer of considerable stature, who appears briefly in “The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover.” He dealt with Conchita and Winston, and testified under oath at the trial.Mr. Mann said Conchita “had no feeling for Winston,”that she married him “with an agenda,” and that when he lived “longer than she anticipated,” she tried to “accelerate” his end.

He added that Conchita Mendoza was “a complete criminal” who did more than steal from Winston Link, she “destroyed his life.” Link died in 2001, before the stolen prints were recovered, and before the opening of the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Va.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until August 8 (209 W. Houston St., between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue, 212-727-8110).


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