Link’s early photography was created with a borrowed medium format Autographic Kodak camera. By the time he was in high school he had built his own photographic enlarger. After completing high school, Link attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, receiving a degree in civil engineering. Before his graduation in 1937, Link spoke at a banquet for the institute’s newspaper, where he served as photo editor. An executive from Carl Byoir’s public relations firm was present and was impressed by Link’s speaking ability. He offered Link a job as a photographer.

Link worked for Carl Byoir and Associates for five years, learning his trade on the job. He adapted to the technique of making posed photographs looking candid, as well as creatively emphasizing a point. On his first major assignment, to photograph part of the state of Louisiana in the summer of 1937, he found himself in New Iberia, the location where Cecil B. DeMille’s 1938 movie The Buccaneer, about Jean LaFitte was being filmed. Here he met his future first wife, a former Miss Ark-La-Tex, now actress/model/body double, Vanda Marteal Oglesby, who stood-in for lead actress Franciska Gaal. They ‘took a shine’ to one another and later that year she posed for some of his photographs in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They eventually married in 1942, but later divorced.

Some of Link’s photographs from this time included an image of a man aiming a gun at a pig wearing a bulletproof vest, and one eventually known as What Is This Girl Selling? or Girl on Ice, which was widely published in the United States and later featured in Life as a “classic publicity picture.” According to Thomas Garver, a later assistant to Link, during his employment at Byoir’s firm, Link “clearly defined a point of view and developed working methods that were to shape his entire career.”

When World War II reached the United States, Link found himself unable to join the military as a result of mumps-induced hearing loss. He left Byoir’s employ in 1942 to work for the Airborne Instruments Laboratory, part of Columbia University. Drawing on both his university degree and professional photographic experience, Link worked at the laboratory as both project engineer and photographer. The laboratory was then researching a device to enable low-flying airplanes to detect submarines underwater. Link’s main responsibility was photographing the project for the United States government.

In 1945, with the end of the war, Link’s employment at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory also ended. Byoir invited Link back, but Link instead opened his own studio in New York City in 1946; his clients included Goodrich, Alcoa, Texaco, and Ethyl.

While in Staunton, Virginia, for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link’s longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. N&W was the last major (Class I) railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel motive power and had refined its use of steam locomotives, earning a reputation for “precision transportation.” Link took his first night photograph of the road on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, Virginia. On May 29, 1955 the N&W announced its first conversion to diesel and Link’s work became a documentation of the end of the steam era. He returned to Virginia for about twenty visits to continue photographing the N&W. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the road completed the transition to diesel, by which time he had accumulated 2400 negatives on the project.

Although it was entirely self-financed, Link’s work was encouraged and facilitated by N&W officials, from President Robert Hall Smith downwards. Besides the locomotives, he captured the people of the N&W performing their jobs on the railroad and in the trackside communities. Some of his images were of the massive Roanoke Shops, where the company had long built and maintained its own locomotives.

Link’s images were always meticulously set up and posed, and he chose to take most of his railroad photographs at night. He said “I can’t move the sun — and it’s always in the wrong place — and I can’t even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting.”