CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
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.