Biography
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, October 9, 1932. Attended
Yale University where he majored in economics, graduat-
ing in 1955. Worked for the Great Northern Railroad as
assistant trainmaster in Willmar, Minnesota. Began his
photographic career in 1959 working as an assistant to O.
Winston Link. During the 1960s he worked extensively
for various magazines, includingAmerican Heritage,Hor-
izon,Vermont Life,andFortune. In 1968 he was awarded
a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial grant to work on a
book on American bridges. At the 1975 Wilson Hicks
Conference on Visual Communication at the University
of Miami, Plowden received an award for outstanding
contributions to documentary photography. In 1978 he
accepted an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor
at the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Tech-
nology in Chicago; in 1982 he was awarded tenure there.
In 1984 he accepted a post as lecturer in the School of
Communications at the University of Iowa, and two years
later was appointed Artist-in-Residence and Senior Fel-
low at the University of Baltimore’s Institute for Publica-
tions Design. His entire archive was acquired by the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University in 1995.
Books
Farewell to Steam, Battlesboro, VT: Stephen Green Press,
1966
Bridges: The Spans of North America, New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 2001
Steel, New York: Viking, 1981
End of an Era: The Last of the Great Lakes Steamers, New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992
Small Town America, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994
The American Barn, New York: W.W. Norton and Com-
pany, 2003Further Reading
McCullough, David.Brave Companions: Portraits in His-
tory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Plowden, David.Imprints. David Plowden: A Retrospective.
Introduction by Alan Trachtenberg. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1997.
Plowden, David.Commonplace. New York: E.P. Dutton &
Co., 1974.POLAROID CORPORATION
The 27 October 1972 cover ofLifemagazine adver-
tised the revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 system—the
first fully automatic, motorized folding single lens
reflex camera that ejects self-developing, self-timing
color prints—with an image of Dr. Edwin Land
using his ‘‘magic camera.’’ Land’s Polaroid Corpora-
tion had been a thriving U.S. company for almost 35
years by the early 1970s, cornering the market on
one-step instant imaging. Land and his kind of
magic photography were well known worldwide by
this time as the company had been producing an
extensive array of Land cameras and Polaroid films
for personal and professional use since 1947 when
Land first announced his one-step instant photo-
graphic process. Yet for most late-twentieth-century
photography consumers, ‘‘Polaroid’’ signifies the
hand-held instant color snapshot originated in 1972:
the kind of image that pops right out of the camera
and develops before one’s eyes. Although realized
approximately 100 years after the first experiments
in photography, Polaroid instant imaging expanded
the possibilities of photography in ways that had not
been previously imagined. Even as we embrace the
digital revolution, the spontaneous thrill of that
instant image still delights us, for the idea and appli-
cation of instant imaging are paramount in our desire
to represent and interpret the visual world. Land, the
‘‘genius’’ asLifecalled him, had perfected a means to
combine the desire to fix one’s image with the satis-
faction of immediate recognition.
Seventeen-year-old Edwin H. Land left Harvard
University in 1926 after his freshman year to pursue
his own work on light polarization. He first estab-
lished the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Bos-
ton in 1932 with Harvard physics professor George
Wheelwright, III, where they continued to research
and produce synthetic polarizers. In 1937, the
Polaroid Corporation was formed. Beginning in
1939, Polaroid produced glasses, ski goggles,
stereoscopic motion picture viewers, fog-free and
dark-adapter goggles for the Army and Navy, and
the company received a contract to develop heat-
seeking missiles equipped with miniature compu-
ters. Focusing its research and development onPOLAROID CORPORATION