“What did they photograph?”
“Almost all of them photographed something that was very still. A great many of them photographed the classrooms—which I felt made a point. And one of them photographed me!”
It is an overcast, extremely humid morning in August, and David Plowden and I are in his gray Datsun station wagon heading out of Chicago, southbound on the Dan Ryan Expressway. Traffic is heavy in every lane, the air foul with exhaust fumes. Plowden knows the road and drives fast, talking rapidly all the while.
“Every time I go to one of these places it’s as if no one else has ever been there before to photograph it. I really don’t give a damn whether anybody was there ten minutes before…. I want to discover it and work with it and explore it myself. People are always saying to me, ‘Well, where do you think you belong?’ I had an exhibition in Chicago last year. And lots of people came. And one man said, ‘Ah—do you think your work has become more formal because you’ve come to the Institute of Design?’ And I said, ‘Well, if it has, I’m not aware of it, and, moreover, I don’t want to be aware of it; I don’t want to become self-conscious.’ I suppose I always feel that to be concerned with oneself is not really an important thing. I don’t feel that photography is a means of self-analysis. You start analyzing your work and you start asking your students to get themselves on the line all the time about what they’re doing, and where do you lose the magic? And it’s so easy because you become so self-conscious and so intellectual and so analytical about it in the long run that you lose that wonderful sort of ego that you have that says, ‘Oh, goddamn it, I don’t care; I love it anyway; I’m going to do it!’”
South Side Chicago, so painfully different from the splendors of the lakeshore, so removed from suburban Winnetka, where Plowden lives, stretches on endlessly. We pass the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches. It is the famous campus by Mies van der Rohe, and in the dim, colorless light it looks dreadful to me, barely distinguishable from the drab surroundings.
We are off for a day to see “real country,” as Plowden says, “south of Kankakee.” His voice is deep and melodious. He is the son of an English actor and he sounds a little like one himself. “South of Kankakee,” he says now again, happily, theatrically, giving it a ring like a refrain from Kipling.
An hour later, approximately ten miles south of Kankakee on Interstate 57, he turns off at a place called Chebanse, a drab little town on the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. He is driving very slowly now, looking at everything. Halfway along what must be the main street, parallel to the railroad tracks, he pulls into a parking lot beside a grain elevator and lumberyard. The lot is empty except for a dump truck. He gets out and walks slowly back and forth, looking at the elevator and its attendant buildings. He stops, stands still, and, hands in pockets, studies a car parked at the curb beside the elevator, and says he wishes it weren’t there.
He is of less than medium height, about five feet seven, and a little on the stout side. He is wearing khaki work pants and a blue-checked shirt. The pants are about an inch too long and scuff the ground. The whole back of his shirt is dark with perspiration.
He is still studying the scene when the noon siren goes off at the firehouse. A man comes out of the lumberyard office—a tall, angular man in bib overalls who looks Plowden over before taking his lunch pail from the front seat of the dump truck. He and Plowden nod hello, and the man walks back into the office.
There is a nice breeze blowing now out of the north, but the sky is still overcast. “A good day for details,” Plowden assures me. He is setting up a tripod and to this mounts the Hasselblad 500-C, which is his favorite camera. “You know, the hardest thing is to get started. You can rationalize away the whole day and never take a picture.”
He trains the lens on the elevator and part of the street, his eye pressed to the viewfinder, or “chimney.” The car he didn’t like has since departed and been replaced by a dusty pickup that he thinks is just right.
As he works, I get out a notebook and begin an inventory of the street. Directly opposite, on the corner, is the former Bank of Chebanse, a neat gray sandstone building with a silvery TV antenna sprouting from its roof and a green real estate sign hanging in front. Beside it, to the right, is Hanson’s Variety Sundries, then a red-brick café with Stroh’s beer announced in red neon in one window and a small black-and-white sign over the door that says GOOD FOOD. The firehouse is beyond the café.
We are on Chestnut Street, I see by the sign at the corner by the bank. Except for the firehouse, the buildings are one story. Above the trees in the distance is the town water tower, the name Chebanse lettered large in blue.
Other cars and a pickup are pulling into the lot. There is much opening and slamming of car doors as a half dozen men pile out for their lunch break. They are in work clothes and mostly young men, some with full beards. They stop talking momentarily as they look Plowden over, then proceed across the street to the café. He appears wholly unaware of them.
On the far side of the tracks, about fifty yards off, is a line of nondescript frame houses of the kind to be seen in every railroad town across the Midwest, or, for that matter, in any number of photographs by David Plowden. I wonder aloud about what buildings might have stood there in the parking lot in days past. “Something did,” says Plowden. “You may be sure of that. There’s always the feeling that something is gone.”
A bell at the railroad crossing starts clanging, and Plowden, obviously delighted, tells me, “We’re going to have a dividend.” A northbound freight rolls through: four diesel engines pulling what seems to be an endless line of chemical tank cars, empty boxcars, and huge, cagelike cars filled with foreign-made automobiles—108 cars in total, Plowden informs me. “I always count them,” he says. The train was a “mixed consist,” he explains, the automobiles coming no doubt from the docks at New Orleans. The four diesel “units” (not engines) were GP 30’s or 35’s, built by General Motors.
In the café later, he asks a pretty waitress what beer they have on tap. She names three or four brands besides Stroh’s, and he orders a Coke and a hamburger. There is a hubbub of voices from the other tables and a clatter of dishes that he has to talk over. He has the classic long jaw and high color of an English country squire. He leans forward, elbows on the table, directly across from me, his dark eyes sparkling. “Imagine! Less than two hours from Chicago and you’re in country like this—in a town like this. You can’t do that from New York, God knows. The land here is more beautiful than anything I knew in the East. The scale is so enormous. You feel the elements here.” He pauses. “Isn’t it fascinating that the skyscraper developed not on an island, where it was needed, but out here, where there’s infinite space.”
David Plowden is past fifty and he has been on the road the better part of his life. He has traveled by rail and highway, in parlor cars and in the cabs of locomotives when the temperature outside was twenty below, in a VW microbus filled with wife and children, and, more recently, in the gray Datsun, usually alone, a tape deck playing Brahms or Fats Waller (“depending on my mood”). He has seen and photographed hundreds of little backwater places like Chebanse. He loves to talk of days spent in Davy, West Virginia, for example, or Cement, Oklahoma (“That’s Cement,” he stresses) or Eleven Mile Corner, South Dakota, recalling the names of diners and motels and people he met. (“Dalhart, Texas…the man’s name was R. W. Wilier. He said, ‘I’m a leftover of the Dust Bowl!’ He invited me to lunch at his house. We had pork chops. Everybody sat with their hats on. He introduced me to his whole family—said, ‘This fellow’s from New York.’ And that’s about all he said, and everybody sat down and ate pork chops.”) He has photographed roadways and main streets and grain elevators, gas stations, ore docks, river steamers and lake steamers, freighters, ferryboats, tugs, lighters, bridges, power lines, steel mills, coal mines, bars, parking lots, skyscrapers, subdivisions, shopping centers and graveyards, freight yards, freight trains, passenger trains, railroad cr
ossings, railroad stations, and steam locomotives. In more than twenty years of work, he has produced some of the most powerful photographs we have of man-made America and of the Mid-western working farmland he has come to love, it would seem, above everything else.
Much of his work has appeared in magazines, often as special portfolios. Time wrote that his photographs tell more about the nation and its manifest values than reams of reports and environmental studies. He has been exhibited at galleries and universities; he is represented in private collections and museums (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress); he has been compared with Walker Evans, the brilliant chronicler of the Dust Bowl; with the painter Edward Hopper; and with Eugene Atget, the great French photographer of the last century. Like Atget, wrote Owen Edwards in American Photographer, Plowden has found “that the camera is a fine device for the remembrance of things passing.”
But the major display of his talent is in his books. They are the lifework. He has produced eight in which he did both the photographs and the text, the most recent of which, Steel, appeared in 1981, and five others for which he provided the illustrations.
A Farewell to Steam, published in 1966, was the first of those he considers entirely his own, and was followed four years later by the sumptuous Lincoln and His America, in which he also included old photographs. The Hand of Man on America, his most popular book, appeared in 1971. It was based on a major exhibition of his work at the Smithsonian and included the picture he is probably best known for—that of the Statue of Liberty rising, ghostlike, from a weedy, rubble-strewn New Jersey wasteland. (“As a photographer,” he wrote in the introduction, “I have turned to the way I know best to express my distress over our appalling indifference and misplaced priorities.”) Floor of the Sky, about the Great Plains, was published in 1972.
Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974) represented six years of photography and research, financed in part by a Guggenheim fellowship, and some twenty-nine thousand miles of travel. As a visual testimony to the grandeur of engineering and as a concise history of American bridge design and construction, it is unequaled by anything in print, a work of imagination and scholarship that would qualify him as someone of note had he done nothing else. In the most personal of his books, Commonplace, also published in 1974, he abandoned the heroic forms of engineering for ordinary side-street, back-door America, and Tugboat (1976) is an exuberant little book about the doings of the Julia C. Moran and her crew on a single day in New York Harbor.
If one is looking for a repeating theme or dominant symbol in his work, the most obvious is the railroad, and the story of his career, at a glance, would appear to be that of the small boy who loved trains and loved taking pictures of them and so grew up to be an important photographer of all that is linked to the railroad and to that distant day when the steam locomotive dominated the landscape.
In fact, his first attempt at a photograph, at the age often, was of a train. He was waiting with his mother on the platform at Putney, Vermont, but when the train came around the bend—“whistling and puffing and roaring down the river into Putney”—he was so frightened he handed the camera back to her. “You take the picture,” he said. A few weeks later, with a new Box Brownie she had given him, he had better luck.
His first published photograph appeared in Trains Magazine in 1954, when he was still in college. It was of the Great Northern Railroad’s celebrated train The Empire Buldier, and Plowden went to Pennsylvania Station in New York to pick up his first copy of the issue. “I thought everybody in the station should come up and shake my hand,” he remembers, “and I was very disappointed when they didn’t.” His first job after college, the only “regular” job he ever had, was on the Great Northern. “Then when I began studying photography seriously, at Rochester [New York] under Minor White, he told me the first thing I had to do was get my trains out of my system. ‘Go and do your engines,’ he would say. ‘You will never do anything else unless you get those engines done. Now go and leave and do them.’”
But for all he feels still about his engines, for all he knows about the whole panoply of American railroading past and present, this is no mere train buff turned photographer; these are not the photographs of some rather uncomplicated or typical American boy who, in middle age, pines for the nighttime wail of Old 97. David Plowden is a deeply thoughtful, perceptive, complex and often troubled man—also a romantic, also humorous, temperamental, stubborn and brave and contradictory. He both adores and abhors the machines and the industrial spectacle he memorializes in his work. He longs for “real country,” as he says, and yet lives in dread of being “sent off to some awful place where I’m supposed to photograph a moose.” He is a profound patriot—as deeply and sincerely patriotic as anyone I know—and at the same time feels himself an alien in most of the land he travels. He will tell you people are his real interest, yet people rarely appear in his photographs.
Even the small towns that he returns to repeatedly for his subject matter both charm and repel him. “I always feel that I love these towns and I always say, ‘What am I doing here?’ I mean, these places sort of—they give you the feeling as you pass through them—‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’…I never wanted to be in these little places. I’ve always been fascinated by them, but I’m always terribly glad when the train pulls away—I leave them there and I’m on a wonderful train, and I can go to the dining car and have a good meal or a good drink. Or I can get into my nice car and put the camera down and get the hell out of town. I just don’t want to be there—in any of them!”
The devotion and energy he gives his work are extraordinary. In private he will speak of it as a calling or mission. Yet he cares little for “camera talk” of any kind. “I think I know less about photography than I do the things I photograph. I suppose I’d like to feel that I’m a historian.”
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. “I feel it’s essential to do it. I feel somehow or other that it’s a mission…that it has nothing whatsoever to do with my own being, but that it’s something quite apart from me. Somehow or other, I happen to have this—whatever the hell you want to call it—talent or gift or obsession or fanaticism or madness or whatever to go out and do this. And, really, it has very little to do with Plowden the family man, or Plowden the friend, or Plowden anything else. I am doing this and I am absolutely consumed with the sense that it has to be done.”
Again and again he has arrived to photograph a certain boat or building or bridge when another week, or even another day, would have been too late. He has photographed the last steam-powered stern-wheel working boat on the Mississippi, the last run on the last day of the Hoboken Ferry. The Scranton railroad station, the SS Algosoo, the old Pittsburgh Point Bridge, are no more. “You know where that is?” he will say, pointing at a photograph of the beautiful Point Bridge. “That’s gone!”
He is not himself of mid-America or anything like it. Born in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, he was raised in an atmosphere of affluence and high liberal ideals in an apartment house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Plowden side of the family has its ancestral base in Plowden, England, where some nine hundred years of Plowdens are buried in the same plot, while his maternal grandfather, George P. Butler, made a fortune on Wall Street around the turn of the century, mainly by merging railroads.
A great-uncle named Reid is said to have brought golf to this country. Another uncle was the American diplomat Ellsworth Bunker, and Grandmother Plowden, a formidable, fearsome figure, spoke five languages, usually picking one you did not know if she wished to put you in your place.
Plowden was born in Boston, not New York, because his parents were on their way to France—and there was a summer place at Putney. Among his earliest memories is being on the train to Vermont and asking his mother over and over, “Ar
e we in real country yet?”
Still, he found his vocation, found himself, in a pursuit of negligible social status and feels his best in the gritty workaday world.
“I have always lived in two worlds,” he explains, and recalls the experience, after Yale, of working on the Great Northern. He had been assigned to Wilmar, Minnesota, ninety miles west of Minneapolis–St. Paul. He was assistant trainmaster on a staff of two and boarded with a family that had a hardware store. But weekends were another matter. His mother had put him in touch with distant relatives who lived in style on Summit Avenue in St. Paul and whose house became his home away from home—“I kept my tuxedo there.” He would come in from Wilmar by freight train Friday nights, shed his work clothes in a locker room, jump in a taxi, and go off to Summit Avenue and the tuxedo and a round of parties, where, as he says, F. Scott Fitzgerald was still alive as far as everybody was concerned.
“I was born—well, not exactly in a tuxedo—but I was born there [on Summit Avenue] in a sense. I loved the parties, sure, of course I did. It was a lot of fun—but I never found the people very interesting.”
He had not found Yale very interesting either, or any of the schools he attended before Yale. In all there were eight—the Home School (“we polished candlesticks”) and the Walt Whitman School, both in Manhattan; Greenfield Hill public school in Fairfield, Connecticut; then a one-room school in Woodstock, New York, where his father was in summer stock; Collegiate, again in Manhattan; Choate, from which he ran away (“I hated it, hated Connecticut; couldn’t stand the smell of burning leaves”); Trinity in Manhattan; and finally the Putney School in Vermont. He was a good student all along, but personally indifferent. At Putney he learned how to use a darkroom.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 70