David Plowden: Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography
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Written by David Plowden, Steve Edwards, and Richard Snow.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
"No one has photographed America as has David Plowden.... He is one of the great artists of our time."—David McCulloughThis beautiful volume is both a tribute to and a celebration of the photographer who, more than anyone else, has given us a visual record of our mark on the land over the last half-century. David Plowden's beautiful black-and-white images reveal his great respect for man's ingenuity and honest work, documenting a disappearing landscape of industry, small towns, wonderful devices, and noble structures.
David McCullough writes, "Plowden has produced some of the most powerful photographs we have of man-made America. He is propelled, driven, by a sense of time running out and the feeling that he must not just make a record, but confer a kind of immortality on certain aspects of American civilization before they vanish." As Walker Evans gave us the first half of the twentieth century, David Plowden has given us the second. David Plowden: Vanishing Point represents the best of this magnificent body of work. 280 duotone photographs.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Good.
Vanishing Point is a record of 50 years of photography by David Plowden, with a lengthy introduction to Plowden's life and work by Steve Edwards, and a very interesting postscript by Plowden.
The book is divided into sections by subject matter: trains, bridges, boats, industry, small towns, open spaces. These are not 'beautiful' photographs: they are beautifully composed and shot, but their subject matter is industrial America in its heyday and in its decline. There are many striking, disturbing images. One is a shot of the Statue of Liberty through power lines and industrial rubbish in New Jersey. It is an image that can be taken many ways, I suppose, but to me it epitomizes the sharp divide between the idealized America of the right-wing punditry and 5th grade history books on the one hand, and the actual America on the other: that mixture of idealism and provincialism, industry and sloth, far-sightedness and short-sightedness.
Seeing the photos from the 60s and 70s reminded me that although we had more and better jobs then, we were not living in paradise. Decay had set in, and the days of American industrial domination were numbered. It was also a reminder that whatever wealth 'we' had and have, the wealth was distributed sharply upward, with vast swaths of America living as an underclass.
Of course, I don't think that Plowden had any such ideas in mind as he made these photographs.
Plowden mostly used a square format Hasselblad camera. He notes in his afterward that good quality film became harder and harder to find in the past 20 years. He has thousands of sheets frozen, against the day when film is no longer available - more than he will ever use in his lifetime.
He spent several months in 2006 learning Photoshop.