History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous Photography, U.S. Travel - General & Miscellaneous, U.S. Travel Photography - General & Miscellaneous, Travel Pictorials
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Overview
From small towns and cityscapes to railroads and bridges, David Plowden has devoted his career to memorializing the vestiges of America's industrial and rural past. In his photographs and writings, he explores the beauty, power, blight, and significance of these once commonplace icons and vistas - and captures the visual texture of a bygone America on the verge of vanishing. His work is clear-eyed, rigorous, and ultimately ambivalent rather than nostalgic; steel mills, for instance, are "at once magnificent and apocalyptic - a definitive expression of mankind's inherently productive and creative, as well as destructive, nature." This book, published in conjunction with a series of retrospective exhibitions across America, looks back over Plowden's entire career and presents the very best of his work."It was my unabashed love for the locomotive that brought me to photography in the first place-there is no sound that stirred my soul like that of a steam whistle," the photographer/author confesses in his preface to Imprints: David Plowden: A Retrospective. Throughout his career, Plowden has documented the open spaces and rural life of the heartland, the vanishing era of steam, and the decaying industrial areas overlooked by most people. Published to coincide with retrospectives at Yale and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, the book has 170 duotone illustrations.
Editorials
Library Journal
After four decades and 19 books chronicling America's small farms, forgotten towns, and aging industrial symbols (see, e.g., Small Town America, LJ 7/94), Plowden's artistry and anger are undimmed. His pictures have always been exquisite acts of salvage. "The fact that the demise of the steam locomotive and the beginning of my career occurred simultaneously was a coincidence that determined the course of the rest of my life," Plowden writes. These 170 black-and-white prints from 40 years show Plowden in all his fields of studyfrom the New Jersey wastelands and West Virginia factory towns to a Brooklyn, IA, rooming-house; the plume of a Great Lakes steamer; the drama of an Indiana blast furnace; or the weathered beauty of a church door in New Diggings, WI. Keeping "one step ahead of the wrecking ball," he has wandered a heartbreaking landscape of endangered places and snapped much of it before it vanished. An excellent introduction to Plowden's beautiful work; highly recommended.Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"Book Details
Published
April 1, 1999
Publisher
Boston : Little, Brown, c1997.
Pages
203
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780821223239