RECENT EXHIBITIONS
Sherman Township, Calhoun County, 2004
David Plowden’s Iowa
May 4, 2026–September 27, 2026
Sioux City Art Center
225 Nebraska Street | Sioux City, IA
David Plowden’s Iowa, a series of black and white photographs shot over four decades, takes a sharp and expansive view of Iowa’s rural communities and agricultural landscapes, including barns, grain elevators, rail lines, businesses, highways, and the remains of once-busy towns. Since Plowden rarely captures any of the people who live in these towns, the images feel both familiar and slightly estranged. Plowden doesn’t editorialize. He doesn’t frame his subjects with nostalgia or critique. He sees what is there and photographs it with quiet conviction. The 64 photographs in the series create a portrait of Iowa that’s plainspoken, layered, and a little uncanny. You get the sense that change is not the same as progress. It is one person’s history of a place, but it’s also about us: what we notice, what we overlook, and what lingers after we leave.
David Plowden’s Iowa was originally organized by Humanities Iowa. Proclaimed “an American treasure” by historian David McCullough, David Plowden has produced 20 books of photos and won many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. The accompanying exhibition catalog contains over 70 pages of photographs, along with an introductory essay by Rima Girnius, PhD, a short biography as well as a conversation with Plowden about his work.
— by Lyle Listamann | November 18, 2025
Slagging Ingots, Steel Mill, East Chicago, Indiana, 1979
David Plowden: Portraits of America
January 26–April 14, 2024
Middlebury College Museum of Art
Mahaney Arts Center, | 72 Porter Field Road | Middlebury, VT 05753
David Plowden likes to quip that throughout a photographic career spanning 1956 until 2011, he stayed “one step ahead of the wrecking ball.” Although some of his most powerful images indeed depict industries that no longer exist, Plowden’s striking photographs are as relevant today as the moment he pushed the shutter on his Roloflex or Hasselblad camera.
The exhibition is arranged around the major themes that dominated the artist’s body of work: locomotives, steam ships, steel mills, bridges, small towns, and the agricultural landscapes of the Midwest. Collectively, these photographs form a sort of “portrait” of some key aspects of life in the United States and Canada in the second half of the twentieth century, a period of great economic, social, and environmental change. A concluding section gathers the portraits of a handful of the many individuals Plowden came to know during his photographic journeys across thousands of miles and nearly six decades–people who derived both paychecks and pride from the industries Plowden photographed.