When customers enter the Commerce Bank branch across Lancaster Avenue from Haverford they see an impressive and brightly colored 10’ x 6 1/2’ mural depicting a Parents’ Day gathering on Founders Green sometime in the 1950s.
What people don’t see is the master, the creative spirit behind the work.

Commerce Bank makes a habit of installing murals in all of its branch locations and when they approached Manuscripts Librarian and Special Collections Archivist Diana Peterson for a suitable photograph from which to make a mural, she responded with a gem – an archival photo by O.W. Link. The image is pure Link in its heavy contrasts and its careful use of light, subtle hallmarks you’ll be hard pressed to find in the colorized mural installed this summer in Commerce Bank.

O. Winston Link, an accomplished commercial and industrial photographer, came to Haverford to take photographs for a New York agency the College had hired to produce Admission materials. Link produced a startling array of finely composed images, playing with meticulously and strategically placed flash bulbs to bounce light back into the camera to an artful effect. The late Peter Moore ’55 helped Winston lug equipment and set up lights around campus during these sessions.

Thomas Garver ’56 met Moore through their common interest in photography and when Garver graduated, he moved to New York where he shared an apartment with Moore and worked for Winston two days a week while he studied art conservation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Garver went on to graduate school at the University of Minnesota and embarked on a long and prolific (and continuing) career in curatorial work, writing, and as a museum director. In the 1990s he curated “Trains That Passed in the Night: The Railroad Photography of O. Winston Link,” organized for the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He has authored chapters and entire volumes devoted to Link’s railroad photography, and he is the curator of the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Va., housed in the old Raymond Loewy-designed N&W Railway Station. To learn more about the museum and about Link, see www.linkmuseum.org.

What you will see on pages 34 through 36 are outtakes from Link’s Admission shoots at Haverford. They are, arguably, not his best work but the craft of Link is evident in the
flashes deftly spaced along the outside of the Great Hall to approximate natural light, in the starkly lit profile of a young face studying a chess board, in the depth of composition and layering of light. The photographs are also a testament to the hidden treasures in Special Collections and the College’s efforts to both preserve and promote these treasures. Link is a man whose life is certainly a woolly tale worthy of a magazine article of its own, a man who, in Garver’s words “loved practical jokes, a very colorful guy and a lover of wordplay.”

An artist whose work links us to a Haverford of yesterday.

Stephen Heacock
Executive Director of Marketing & Communications

Vermont Grown
Amy Trubek '85 and Bing Broderick '85 treasure the lost craft of locally based cooking.