One day in the early 1940s, David Plowden picked up his Kodak Brownie box camera and headed with his mother to the train depot near his family’s farm in Vermont. He was 11 years old and so fascinated by steam engines that he often traveled on the railway tracks and befriended some of the conductors and engineers.
On that particular day, he watched in amazement as a powerful coal-fired engine approached the station. Such trains were still traveling around the country, although they would soon Give Way To diesel locomotive.
But as soon as the train stopped, he got nervous and handed the camera to his mother. As he reminisced about himself website, She told him: “You take the picture!”
This was probably the last time he missed a shot.
Famous for his whimsical black-and-white songs about steam trains and other relics of the fading industrial age, Mr. Plowden died May 4 at a retirement community in Evanston, Ill. He was 93 years old. His wife, Sandra Plowden, said the cause was a heart attack.
O. Unlike Winston Link, who was also known for his railroad photography, Mr. Plowden did not confine himself largely to trains. His work provided a comprehensive study of the changing landscape of America in an era of declining industrial dominance.
Beginning with “Farewell to Steam” in 1966, he published more than 20 books of photographs that balanced a vaguely Norman Rockwell-like vision of Americana with moody musings on the country’s seemingly endless compulsion to build and then abandon his creations.
He once said, “I am seized with a sense of urgency to record those parts of our heritage which seem to recede as rapidly as the view from behind a speeding train.” “I fear that we are erasing the evidence of our past achievements so quickly that over time we will lose all sense of who we are.”
A disciple of Depression-era photographer Walker Evans, Mr. Plowden began aiming the lenses of his tripod-mounted Hasselblad cameras at soot-stained steel mills, Great Lakes cargo ships and other pre-war industrial artifacts in the 1960s.
This was the time when American manufacturing began to move overseas and eventually become automated. He often joked that he performed his professional duties “one step ahead of the wrecking ball.”
As Richard Snow, the longtime editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote in the introduction to “Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography,” a 2007 retrospective of Mr. Plowden’s career, “What he has done is nothing less than capturing an entire country going through 50 years of changes as significant as the Industrial Revolution.”
Along with the remnants of heavy industry, Mr. Plowden lovingly documented rural America with its granaries and run-down barns, which he saw as symbols of a more honest era of human labor.
“I like taking pictures of gears,” he said A 2011 interview With HuffPost. “I love photographing machinery that needs people to operate it. There’s nothing more beautiful than a shovel. Have you ever seen someone shoveling coal in a locomotive, or sifting wheat? It almost seems like a ballet.”
He remained proudly agnostic about the trends in fine art photography with theoretical overlays, double exposures and motion blur.
“I’ve been called the ‘straight photographer,’ which is a way of putting me in my place,” Mr. Plowden said. 1999, in a public television documentary On his career as told by Bill Curtis. It was a label he embraced.
He did not believe that photographic experimentation – “manipulating things and photographing things for sensation,” as he put it – was the only way to be an artist.
In the documentary, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough, a college friend from Yale, described his photographs as deceptively “simple”.
Mr. Plowden approached his work like a 19th-century painter, artfully composing each shot, avoiding extraneous detail and waiting to fire the shutter until the light was just right.
As a result, Mr. McCullough said, he made “brilliant photographs.”
David Plowden was born in Boston on October 9, 1932, the elder of two children to Roger Plowden, a British-born actor and set designer, and Mary (Butler) Plowden, an accomplished pianist.
When he was 6, his family moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he remembers staring out the window as steamships and tugboats rolled along the East River. (That fascination was reflected in “Tugboat,” a collection of photographs he published in 1976.)
The family spent summers on their farm in Putney, Virginia, and David eventually attended the Putney School, a private high school, where he learned darkroom and other photography skills, before graduating in 1951.
He attended Yale, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1955. But he had little interest in the business world and decided to pursue a career in photography by taking classes with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Returning to New York City, he met Mr. Evans, then a staff photographer and photo editor at Fortune magazine, and visited him at the Time & Life Building.
“In the evenings, we would stand there,” Mr. Plowden told HuffPost, “and here were these huge, huge glass and brick buildings that were part of Midtown New York; he would look at these things and I would realize he was looking at shadows.”
“It taught me how to understand that other dimension,” he added, “the architecture of light.”
Over the years, Mr. Plowden’s work has appeared in The New York Times, American Heritage and other publications. It is now included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and other institutions.
Mr Plowden’s first marriage to Plaisance Coggeshall ended in divorce in 1976. He married Sandra Shoelkopf in 1977. He is survived by his two children, Philip and Karen Plowden; two sons, John and Daniel, from his first marriage; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
In 1978, Mr. Plowden took up a teaching position at the Design Institute at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and settled in the city with his family.
The surrounding areas of the Midwest proved to be fertile ground. In 1981, he published “Steel”, which documented a year of shooting at the Indiana Harbor Works steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana.
His renderings of rural America’s troubled small towns and family farms formed the basis of his final book, “Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie,” published in 2013, when he was 81.
Such images capture life on a smaller scale, with a more authentic human connection.
“Wal-Mart has taken over Main Street,” Mr. Plowden said. A 1996 interview With the Winnetka Historical Society of Illinois. “I’m really trying to show what Wal-Mart has destroyed.”
