Daily Inspiration Quote by O. Winston Link

It sounds like a brag until you hear the exhaustion in it. "I was one man" is Link shrinking himself on purpose, framing his work as a lopsided matchup: a single obsessive artist versus a huge, impersonal machine. The "big railroad" isn’t just Norfolk and Western steel; it’s an institution with its own schedule, rules, and indifference to being turned into art. By choosing the blunt verb "tackled", he casts photography as contact sport: logistics, persuasion, timing, weather, and risk, not just a guy with a camera waiting for luck.

Link’s context matters. He documented steam locomotives in the 1950s as dieselization was erasing them, often staging elaborate nighttime scenes with banks of flashbulbs to make these engines look mythic and cinematic. That technical bravura can tempt audiences into thinking the images arrived fully formed. The line is a corrective: behind the iconic glow is solo labor and a constant negotiation with a corporate system that doesn’t care about nostalgia.

"I did the best I could" lands as both humility and defense. It preempts second-guessing from historians, railfans, and critics who treat documentation like a moral duty. Link is admitting limits: access denied, shots missed, compromises made. The subtext is almost American: the individual wrestling a vanishing industrial world into memory, then refusing to pretend the wrestling didn’t leave bruises.