DAVID PLOWDEN
American
David Plowden’s work documents the ordinary
and often overlooked in America, the common-
place and the taken-for-granted. He is often com-
pared to other documentary photographers, from
Walker Evans to Eugene Atget in that his work
displays the qualities associated with the classic,
black-and-white images created by these masters,
yet the fact that he photographed in the late dec-
ades of the twentieth century imbue his images with
an atavistic quality.
Born in Boston, Plowden was educated at an
assortment of mostly private schools, none of which
he remembered with much fondness. He ran away
from one, Choate, yet managed to do well, even-
tually overcoming his adolescent antipathy to the
state of Connecticut to matriculate at Yale Univer-
sity in New Haven where he majored in economics.
He had learned the rudiments of photography
and black and white printing as a teenager at the
Putney School in Vermont, but his first job out of
college was as an assisstant trainmaster for the
Great Northern Railroad. He was assigned to a
two-man depot in Willmar, Minnesota, a small
city about 100 miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul.
After a year he moved to New York City, where he
worked briefly as a travel advisor and clerk, first for
the American Express Company and later for
Nametra, Inc. It was not until 1958, three years
after his graduation from college that he decided
to pursue photography. In 1959 he worked as an
assistant to O. Winston Link, who achieved a mea-
sure of fame as a photographer of American rail-
roads. A year later Plowden spent five months
studying with the master of the ‘‘straight’’ photo-
graph, Minor White, followed by a longer stint in
New York City with George Meluso, who specia-
lized in fashion and commercial photography.
Walker Evans was an important early mentor, and
Nathan Lyons encouraged him to ‘‘photograph the
unphotographable,’’ sound advice he never forgot.
During this formative period the principle focus
of his photography became apparent when in 1959
and again in 1960 he traveled to eastern Canada
and Maine to photograph the last active steam
locomotives in North America.
‘‘Itbegantodawnonme,’’Plowdenwritesin
Imprints. A Retrospective, ‘‘that I hadn’t simply
been documenting steam locomotives in their
final hour. I was witnessing something of far
greater consequence: the transformation of a cul-
ture.’’ Therein lies the meaning and significance of
Plowden’s work. His images describe an America
that is still hand-made, ruggedly individualistic,
and beautiful, an America that becomes harder
and harder to find. His stunning black-and-white
images of great engines of commerce and the built
environment describe a slow but seemingly inexor-
able drift into senescence and disuse. His subjects
include steam-driven ships and locomotives, em-
battled family farms, villages and small towns
across rural America, the once vibrant steel indus-
try, and most recently the American barn. It
would be a mistake, however, to conclude that
Plowden is only a compulsive collector of quaint
and antique Americana. His principle subject is
American culture, with special emphasis on its
extraordinary evolution since the end of the Sec-
ond World War. In many of his meticulous images
of the built landscape, Plowden presents things
and places that have lost their ability to compete
in a new global marketplace. By so doing he forces
us to examine and then re-examine our headlong
rush to jettison the forms and structures of the
past, discarding without thought or feeling what
is no longer sufficiently useful or efficient. Plow-
den’s photographs celebrate the non-global Amer-
ica, a place of productive farms and somnolent
small towns, of grain elevators and bridges grace-
fully spanning great rivers.
It is as if 40 years after the heyday of the legend-
ary Farm Security Administration (FSA) photogra-
phers Plowden decided to continue their work. Roy
Stryker, who organized and directed the Historical
Section of the FSA, wished to create a vast visual
encyclopedia of America during the years 1935–- Plowden is similarly motivated. Driving
from place to place, preferring two-lane ‘‘blue’’
highways to the interchangeable, characterless in-
terstate system, Plowden searched out the unique,
timeless, and visually powerful. If the light is not
acceptable he waits or returns another day; he does
not add light of his own. He uses a Hasselblad
PLOWDEN, DAVID