David Plowden
A Handful of Dust: Photographs of Disappearing America
" When describing my work I have always said that I have been one step ahead of the wrecking ball. I have often managed to arrive on the scene with my camera at the eleventh hour. Today the metaphorical wrecking ball has done it's work. Far too many places I once knew are now but a handful of dust." For four decades, photographer David Plowden of Winnetka has documented our country's vanishing landscapes and artifacts, his stunning black-and-white photographs forming an image of life in 20th-century urban and rural America.
Plowden explores nature's reclamation of all kinds of human structures and captures an America that is slowing fading away: from grain elevators and barns to banks and barbershops, deserted Main Streets to crumbling facades. "For fifty years I have tried to photograph this America we are losing. In every way possible I have said that what we took for granted was disappearing. I realized it would be gone. I was right. It is." Plowden and his wife, Sandra, traveled America's country highways and back roads to gather pictures for this series. "Sometimes the images are very beautiful celebrations; other times they comment on the destructive hand of man on the landscape and nature," says Corinne Rose, manager of education for the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. (excerpt from Requiem for a Lost Era,
Chicago Tribune Magazine, Section 10, May 7, 2006)
" Anyone looking with care at Plowden's books over the past three decades will not be surprised by what is revealed here, the consistency not only of subject but of certain intellectual and artistic concerns," writes Alan Trachtenberg in the
Introduction to Plowden s publication,
Imprints (1997). "...he belongs in the small and noble company of innovators, a cross between Walker Evans in his
Fortune essays and Wright Morris in his 'photo-texts'." Plowden graduated from Yale College in 1955 and later studied with noted photographer Minor White. Plowden estimates that he has taken about 13 miles of film in producing more than 20 books of photography and commentary. In 1968, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on the bridges of North America. His work resides in the permanent collections of, among other places, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. Today, Plowden s work can be found at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago s River North.
Plowden never uses a flash, and works only with available light. He works in what is called a "wet darkroom". Most printing today is done with computers in so-called dry or digital darkrooms. "He is meticulous...he slides the negative into the enlarger and a sheet of photo paper into the easel below. He uses his hands to manipulate the enlarger's dim light over the paper to bring out detail and add shadow. Then he puts the paper into the plastic tray of developer and submerges it deeper and deeper, his fingers darting in and out of the liquid." (excerpt from Requiem for a Lost Era,
Chicago Tribune Magazine, Section 10, May 7, 2006)
In viewing Plowden's work, it is evident that he is successful in his fifty year endeavor to capture the essence of a changing America. "A hundred years from now people looking at my pictures will see an America that no longer exists; a foreign country as different today as we perceive the country before the Civil War."
Plowden's
A Handful of Dust can be viewed at Brickton through November 18th. This show is underwritten by Northern Trust and PhillipsCrampton Photo&Design.
