ABOUT DAVID PLOWDEN
David Plowden 2007, photo copyright © 2007 by Russell Phillips Photography
David Plowden, Photographer, 1932–2026
By Steve Edwards
David Plowden, the renowned American photographer and noted chronicler of America’s disappearing industrial and agrarian eras, has died at the age of 93.
Best known for his powerful, elegiac black and white images of railroad locomotives and rural landscapes, Plowden devoted his entire photographic career to capturing vanishing aspects of American life. Historian David McCullough considered him “an American treasure”, calling him one of the great artists of our time. “No one has photographed America as has David Plowden,” McCullough said.
During his life, Plowden published more than 20 photography books. They covered everything from bridges and barns to steel mills, steam engines and small-town Iowa.
Today his photographs reside in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution, among many others. The largest and most comprehensive collection of his work resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which is home to his collected papers and more than five thousand of his prints.
Born in Boston in 1932, Plowden moved to New York as a child. He became fascinated at a young age by the steamships and tugboats trawling up and down the East River, which he glimpsed through the bedroom window of his family’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A childhood fascination with trains soon followed.
As a young boy, he spent many days riding train lines up and down the Northeast, befriending the conductors and engineers along the way. Mesmerized by the dramatic force and scale of steam locomotives, one day an 11-year-old Plowden brought his new Brownie box camera to capture a train pulling into the station not far from his family’s farm in Putney, Vermont. Too overwhelmed by the moment, he handed the camera to his mother at the last minute and exclaimed “You take the picture!” She did, but Plowden was ready the next time – and thus began a lifelong love affair with photography.
A graduate of The Putney School and Yale University, Plowden went on to study photography under Minor White and Nathan Lyons. He also served as an assistant to photographers O. Winston Link and George Meluso. Encounters with Ansel Adams and Walker Evans further inspired his approach, as did a life-long love of art, movies and classical music. After viewing a portfolio of Plowden’s early work, Minor White told him he “had the eye of a poet”.
Plowden’s iconic picture of the Statue of Liberty, barely glimpsed through smog in the distance and a tangle of garbage and electricity lines in the foreground, served as the inspiration and cover image for his 1971 book The Hand of Man on America. More than two decades later, it was used as the cover art for the Counting Crows 1997 album, Across a Wire: Live in New York City.
In 1968, Plowden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, a prestigious research grant from the Smithsonian Institution. He spanned the nation, photographing bridges of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He chronicled one of the last regular mainline railroads in North America to use a steam locomotive. He was aboard the last steam-powered ferry that crossed the Hudson River from Manhattan to Hoboken, New Jersey. In all cases, Plowden sought to produce art that transcended the object. He was interested in highlighting the majestic in the mundane, and in asking deeper questions about what we create, what we value and what we discard as a culture.
Plowden moved to Chicago in 1978 to take a one-year teaching position at the Institute of Design, the renowned Bauhaus-inspired school founded by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. He later taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Baltimore, and Grand Valley State University. As a teacher, Plowden was exacting in the darkroom but encouraging in the field. He urged his students to follow their passions – and to get to know the people, places and subjects they photographed.
Plowden’s preferred camera was a large and somewhat cumbersome Hasselblad, affixed to a tripod. Unlike photographers who prefer to take dozens of images in rapid fire fashion, Plowden was more methodical and selective in his approach. The Hasselblad allowed him to survey a scene uninhibited. Peering down into the Hasselblad from above, he would frame his field image like a portraitist, wait until the light was just right, and take his picture. “Photography was innate,” Plowden said. “That’s the truth. I never had to think about how to make a photograph.”
Following his time at the Institute of Design, Plowden, along with his wife Sandra and their two children, made the Chicago area his adopted home. He devoted the next five decades to chronicling the people and machinery in the nation’s industrial and agricultural heartland. He spent a year with laborers inside the blazing cauldron of a steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana. He traversed the Great Lakes to capture the last of the coal fired steamships that had once dominated those waterways for more than a century.
In the forward to Vanishing Point, Plowden’s 2008 career retrospective, Richard Snow, writer and former editor of American Heritage, compared Plowden’s body of work to Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange and other great photographers of the WPA era. “What he has done is nothing less than capture a whole nation passing through fifty years of changes as momentous as those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution,” Snow wrote.
Loss and change were throughlines throughout Plowden’s career. Like a naturalist obsessed with preserving endangered species, he felt compelled to capture the last remaining vestiges of a rapidly eroding era. Even so, he brought an indefatigable spirit and irrepressible zest to his work. “I’m one step ahead of the wrecking ball,” he often quipped.
Plowden was approaching his 75th birthday when he was putting the finishing touches on Vanishing Point. Intended to be his last book, the project soon triggered a new burst of prolific picture-making. He and his wife, Sandra, returned to the field, travelling hundreds of miles of backroads and byways across the Great Plains in search of landscapes and disappearing aspects of rural America. The resulting book, Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie, was published in 2013 at the age of 81.
Though declining mobility in his later years prevented him from continuing to photograph in the field, Plowden never stopped working. A devoted darkroom purist, Plowden eventually mastered Adobe Photoshop and other aspects of the digital printing process during his 80’s. He remained passionate about preserving all that he had documented over the course of his life, working feverishly into his 90’s to catalogue the work he’d produced before time caught up with him.
Photographer Glenn Hansen worked closely with Plowden during those final years. It was the culmination of a partnership that began when Hansen was a student at the Institute of Design in the late 1970’s. He studied under Plowden and went on to serve as Plowden’s darkroom assistant from 1979 until 1991. The two remained close for nearly 50 years.
“He was more than just a photographer. He was a historian and a visual anthropologist,” Hansen recalled. “He was so committed to his work. But it was not about him. It was about what he saw, what he captured, and what he wanted to share about America.”
A new exhibition of Plowden’s work, David Plowden’s Iowa, opened on May 4th, the same day he passed away. It runs through September 30th at Sioux City Arts Center in Sioux City, Iowa.