WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.  (February 21, 2011) Before becoming an author, curator, and museum director Thomas Garver assisted photographer O. Winston Link as he recorded the last days of the steam engines of the Norfolk & Western Railway. Garver will speak about their work in a talk at Reynolda House Museum of American Art on Tuesday, March 1 at 5:30 p.m.

Admission is $5, free for members and students. Guests are encouraged to arrive early, as seating is limited and the event is expected to sell out. For information, please call 336.758.5150 or visit reynoldahouse.org. Admission to the lecture includes entry to the featured exhibition, "Trains that Passed in the Night: The Photographs of O. Winston Link," on view through June 19, 2011.

In a talk titled, "They Worked While You Slept: The Photographs of O. Winston Link," Garver will describe the way the Link created his iconic images by making many of the highly staged photos at night using a huge array of flashbulbs synchronized to the shutters of the cameras so as to capture trains moving as fast as 60 miles per hour. Not only did he document the last steam locomotives on this railroad, he also documented the last years of independent small town life in the Appalachian regions of Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

Garver contributed to Link's first book "Steam, Steel & Stars," and was the sole author of the second book of Link's railroad photos, "The Last Steam Railroad in America." Following Link's death in 2001, Garver served as organizing curator of the O. Winston Link Museum, located in the former Norfolk & Western passenger station in Roanoke, VA.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is one of the nation's premier American art museums, with masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its permanent collection.  Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features traveling and original exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings and other events.  The museum is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the historic 1917 estate of Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband, Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolda House and adjacent Reynolda Gardens and Reynolda Village feature a spectacular public garden, dining, shopping and walking trails. For more information, please visit reynoldahouse.org or call 336.758.5150.

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