At Yale he majored in economics, loathing every moment. “A phalanx of uncles had to be coped with. I suppose it had a lot to do with the fact that my father had not been so successful. I felt such an affinity with him—so much more than the others.”
His father, the actor, was the idolized one. Alone of the male side of the family, his father stood by him, insisting he was meant for other things. But his father was also ill much of the time.
His mother, too, Plowden says, was a never-failing source of encouragement. “I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, she would take me out to the railroad yards in Secaucus, New Jersey, and she would sit there all afternoon so I could photograph.”
It was at Yale, in freshman English, that I first met Plowden, though I saw little of him then and sometime later he dropped out, took a year at Columbia. When we ran into each other next, it was in New York nearly ten years later. He was married, living in Brooklyn, and having a difficult time trying to make his way as a photographer.
“A steel mill! There’s nothing more photographable than a steel mill…. To me, it’s the most awesome spectacle we have…. I mean, can you believe it! It’s like a miniature volcano—all contained—made by us…. There’s nothing more terrifying than being in a steel mill. You’ve been in a steel mill; you know what the hell it’s like!”
We are back in the car, continuing south on 1-57. For a while we have talked about favorite books. “Conrad,” he said at once. “All of Conrad. And Willa Cather.” And favorite photographers. He named Paul Strand and Walker Evans. I asked how he felt about Stieglitz. “Funny about Stieglitz—isn’t it awful—but I never liked Stieglitz—never, never…I’ve always felt he was terribly self-conscious. For Christ’s sake, don’t say that around anyone or I’ll be run out of my profession.”
“You’ve already run out, haven’t you?” I said. “You ran out.”
“Yes, I ran out.”
“You never got in?” We were both laughing.
“Listen, I never got in. I’m a heretic. That’s what the man who hired me said. He hired me because I’m a heretic. And he said, ‘I want you to teach your heresy down here.’”
“What’s so heretical about you?”
“Well, I guess I feel that photography is not a holy cow….”
We moved on to favorite painters. “Well—Cezanne,” he said after a pause. “And Monet.” What about the Americans, I asked. “Hopper,” he said. “Hopper, I would say definitely. I actually adore Hopper—I love him.”
Did he think Hopper had been an influence on him? I disliked the question, but felt I must ask.
“No. I have not been influenced by Hopper at all. I think Hopper and I probably love the same things. But I started photographing and doing things long before I was really aware of Hopper. It’s so hard to say whether you’re influenced by someone or not. Of course, you want to say, ‘No, certainly not; I’m my own man, and my own person, of course—I’ve never been influenced by anybody.’ Sure, I suppose I’ve been influenced by Hopper and Walker [Evans] and all those people I admire tremendously. I don’t think you can help it.”
“Are you working in their tradition?”
“I hope so.”
“Carrying the torch?”
“I hope so—in a way. It’s a hell of a torch to carry. Yeah—I hope I am.”
I wondered how much interest he has in films and if he had ever seen any that seemed to be doing what he does. He mentioned Days of Heaven and The Last Picture Show. But when I asked if he had any favorites, he all but shouted with delight, “The Marx Brothers—my favorite of all people in the world. I love the Marx Brothers. I would drive a thousand miles…. I know every piece—I know everything—A Night at the Opera—the scene in the dressing room—the stateroom—where they’re all in there….”
But now we have turned to steel mills.
“It’s like being in hell,” he says. “Absolutely terrifying place! And yet, can you believe that we’ve been able to do that? And look at the goddamn mess it makes of everything! Look what it’s done to the poor guys who work there—look at the pollution, the filth! Look at the bodies of the people who work in these places. And yet, at the same time, these men who work there are intensely proud. And I think there are some who are proud of doing it because they know how goddamn dangerous it is. They’re almost at war. It’s almost like this American thing of always being at war, always having a war to fight. We’re always fighting the frontier; we’re always fighting the mine, trying to get the coal out of the ground. We’re always beating ourselves against things, and I think that’s so much the American spirit. And you get out here and it looks beautiful now, but Jesus Christ, in an hour and a half we might have a tornado, a hailstorm. This guy’s field”—he is pointing to a cornfield to the right—will be laid flat, cut to ribbons. Now he’s pitting himself against it. Look at that water standing in that field there. See that below—he had to replant all that. That was all wasted away….
“The guys at Dessie’s Bar [a place in Virginia that he has photographed], they’re the guys who hack the coal out. There was one guy there whose son took me around, and the son said, ‘My daddy goes in that mine six miles every day and he works on his knees.’ And they all have black lung and they all live filthy, goddamn broken lives—they’re all horrible places to work in….
“There’s a picture in the book of a fellow who was slagging the steel—you know, throwing the slag off the top of the ingots with all those showers of sparks; and when he finished, he came rushing out and he ripped open his coat, and he said, ‘Look, mosquito bites, mosquito bites.’ And there were scars from all of the sparks, and he was proud of it—this great guy. These people are heroic. The locomotive engineer…the farmer who is out pitting himself against the weather and against the goddamn bugs and everything else all the time—to me they’re much more real than the guy who makes the money and sits in the office…I find myself more sympathetic to them. I always have…. I suppose it’s also because I can’t imagine anything duller than sitting in an office all day long.”
We have left 1-57 and are cutting cross-country, heading west, inland, on all but empty section roads. “One of my students, a guy from Taiwan, couldn’t believe it when he saw this. I was out here with a class and he wasn’t photographing. He said, ‘I can’t deal with this. I’ve never seen land like this.’”
The road is as straight as a landing strip and walled in on both sides by corn eight feet high, higher, mile after mile after mile. When the road rises and there is a break in the corn, we can see enormous distances—six, maybe ten miles; I can’t tell because the scale of everything is so different. I feel like the student from Taiwan. There are no fences and the few houses barely show above the corn.
“All right, David,” he explains. “This is the Corn Belt! Right in the middle of it!”
He wants to stop and get out, but he is waiting for another rise where we can see. We are doing about sixty. It is beginning to look as though the sun might break through for the first time all day. A grasshopper, or something, splatters against the windshield. A soybean field appears suddenly on the right. In the middle, maybe five hundred yards from the road, a lone, small figure of a man is working with a hoe. Then, as abruptly, he and his field are gone, and we are in corn again.
There is a lot of blue sky suddenly. And now the sun is out and brilliant beyond expectation, changing the look of everything. Plowden likes the change. “All the time, the whole thing is light,” he says. “And the light out here…well, look, from one horizon to another, it’s the sky.”
The air rushing past the window is noticeably hotter, but I am struck even more by the smell. I have smelled growing corn before but never anything like this.
“And just listen,” says Plowden, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “It doesn’t make any noise…you’d think that anything that was in such abundance would yell.”
A sign says that what we are seeing is Lester Fister’s Hybrid Corn.
<
br /> We hit a long, slow rise and at the crest, at a crossroad, he pulls off on the shoulder. We are at the junction of 400 East and 2200 North, according to an incongruous street sign.
We get out, and the wonderful smell is nearly overpowering. I hear an airplane faintly in the distance. Otherwise there is little or no sound. Again we can see for miles, the roads running off exactly to the four points of the compass. We are immersed in corn smell and silence and Illinois summer. A mile up the road the sun is hitting what must be a metal barn roof. In nature there are no straight lines, I seem to remember reading somewhere, and here everything runs straight—roads, fields, roof lines—yet you feel an elemental force in the corn itself, as if the land has never really been tamed.
I check my watch. It is two-fifteen, less than twenty-four hours since Plowden met me at O’Hare.
His face is alight with pleasure, “We’re ‘smack dab in the middle of the country,’ as Sandra says. No matter which way you look, it’s America.”
Sandra, his wife, is the former Sandra Schoellkopf of Buffalo, whom he married five years ago after an earlier marriage—to Pleasance Coggeshall—ended in divorce. Plowden has four children, two grown from his first marriage, a young son and daughter from his second marriage.
He must have a souvenir of this spot, he announces. I think he means to pilfer a green ear of Lester Fister’s Hybrid. Instead he is setting up for a picture. “You know, half the pictures are souvenirs.”
He talks now while he works, only it is talk broken by periodic pauses, sometimes in midsentence, so that it comes out like this:
“Hear the cicada?…The light…is certainly going to…be possible…in about two seconds…. Clouds are like pieces of concrete…. Is that car coming or going?…I can’t tell…. Now hear the rustle…when the wind starts. It’s almost eerie…out here…when you’re by yourself…and the wind begins to blow on the corn.”
It is an impossible picture, he concludes. There is no way to convey the sensation of such space. I am sure he is right.
Half an hour later we are in Gilman, again on the Illinois Central Gulf, and he has already made several shots from a spot beside Jed’s Yazoo Mowers (“Sales and Service”), where Main Street crosses the tracks. There is more to Gilman than Chebanse. A James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, is playing at the Palace up the block. There is a Ben Franklin, a Montgomery Ward. Plowden is concentrating on the stark, silver-gray side wall of Roeder’s Hardware, which is in the immediate foreground. I ask what he meant when he said clouds are like pieces of concrete.
“When you get that great white blob up there”—he points to what seems to be a perfectly beautiful cloud hanging over the store—“in a still black-and-white picture, it’s going to be just as important as that car that’s moved in there”—in front of the store—“and it’s going to make just as much difference as that white car”—farther off down the street—“in the whole composition.”
He likes this corner. The words Roeder’s Hardware are painted in elegant old style across the upper left-hand side of the blank wall. “It’s just fun. It’s just pure fun! I mean, it’s a wonderful sign. And a wonderful old tin building and this funny old main street…and the window makes it [a small first-floor window on the right]…. I can’t resist it. You know what I really love about doing this? In a sense I preserve this little place—I caught it, and it won’t disappear. It’s been held. There’s something about this particular moment, this particular unique little corner—and it’s not going to go. I love that feeling; I love that feeling of getting this place. You know, when you talk about everything disappearing and time going by and…it’s sort of a nice feeling to think that even if that tin place burns down like that building in front of the town up there”—he has seen something I haven’t—“maybe, maybe these pictures will be preserved just the way we have all of those pictures from other times that somebody else took the trouble to do. And to me, to be part of that tradition is very, very important.”
Several minutes pass and nothing is said. Two or three more cars have pulled in and parked near the front of the store.
“Now, you see how it works with all those cars lined up…you see, the single car there didn’t work out at all.” He makes several more shots. “I really love that feeling…to hold, to preserve some of this. You’re seeing me at home. This is my turf. This is the kind of thing I would rather do than anything else. I always just gravitate to these old sort of…always along the railroad and always out in this country. It’s home—I just poke around.”
We pay a call at the Gilman Star and introduce ourselves to the editor and publisher, George Elliott, who stands at the front counter with us chatting about crops and Gilman and his paper. He bought it soon after the Second World War and has been doing “just fine.” We buy two copies and leave, Plowden having taken no pictures of Mr. Elliott or his office and having said nothing about being a photographer.
“I always feel it’s a terrible imposition,” he says afterward in the car. “If I had taken his picture he would have become a character. We were equals at the time.”
I ask if this is the sort of day he would be having if he were alone. Yes, he says, except that about now he would find a cool spot in a graveyard somewhere and take a nap.
We continue west, never out of corn country, except in the little towns. Plowden studies the sky and predicts perfect light by evening. At Piper City he slows to a crawl—looking, looking, looking. “These towns are like postage stamps. They’re just pasted down on the land.” We pass a playground under shade trees, a nice old house with a big screened porch. “Piper City,” he says softly. “Look at this one right here…the house behind the iron fence…that’s a marvelous house. It’s after 1870…because look at the panes of glass, in fours.” A smaller house with some young girls sitting on the porch looks, he says, like the house Ronald Reagan lived in in Dixon, to the northwest. “Piper City,” he repeats again.
At Chatsworth he likes what he sees enough to get out and walk around. We go into a junk shop. He is interested in souvenir ashtrays, and he finds three he likes, as well as some postcards and a rusty outdoor thermometer with a crack in the glass. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. William Durante, strike up a conversation. We learn that they once owned the Biograph in Chicago, the motion picture theater where Dillinger was shot and killed. It explains, they say, the pictures they have hanging of Dillinger and FDR. A vacant movie house across the street is also theirs and also, like the pictures of Dillinger and FDR, for sale. We all study it through the window. The price is $15,000, they tell Plowden. It is his chance to make a killing in show business, says Mrs. Durante, and we all laugh, Plowden the loudest.
At Forest, where we get gas, he reports that we have driven 170 miles, and we start south on Route 47, a two-lane cement road that he considers one of the most beautiful roads in America.
“The shame is, most people never travel a road like this, never see this kind of country, or, if they do, don’t bother to look because it’s not their idea of scenery.”
In another hour we have passed through Strawn and Sibley and detoured to circle an idle line of freight cars, Plowden trying and failing to get an angle he likes. We have been off on a dirt road between empty fields, scaring up hundreds of small bright yellow butterflies—sulphur butterflies, according to Plowden—and we have swung back onto 47, heading straight through to Gibson City.
“I remember once in a dining car, the steward had all the shades pulled down, and we were going across Kansas or Oklahoma, someplace along there. And I pulled up the shade—and I was almost the only person in the car—and the fellow came by again and pulled the shade down. He said, ‘There’s nothing to see out there, son.’ He said, ‘It isn’t worth looking at.’ I was outraged. I pulled it up, figured I was a patron. But I think so many people feel that way about this country—that it isn’t worth looking at. And they’re the people who don’t know it. I think the people who live here love it. But I think people who don’t
know aren’t aware of this. You know, they’re going to the Rockies or they’re going to Sun Valley, or they’re on their way to ski or to see the Grand Canyon. It’s so sad…I used to call up the AAA—used to be a member—and ask them to route me someplace, and then I would go the other way. I still feel that way.”
Gibson City disappoints him. Gibson City has dressed up its Main Street. Somebody has sold its merchants on the idea of visual uniformity. Instead of the usual chaos of signs, every shop and store is labeled in the same orange lettering on a milk-chocolate background. “Suburban. Awful,” Plowden mutters, and we swing north and east on Route 54, which will take us back to 1-57.
The light on the fields and distant farm buildings is beautiful beyond anything we have seen all day. Ahead, according to the map, is Roberts. It will be our last stop, Plowden decides.
“What are the principal aggravations of your work?”
“Aggravations? My own shyness.”
“What a wonderful answer.”
“My own feeling of reticence to go and say, ‘Here I am. I’m here to photograph your land.’ You know, ‘Taking a little bit of your home—a little bit of your soul. I want to steal a little bit.’ I feel that way. I feel a terrible imposition. I feel that it’s a tremendous privilege to go to somebody’s place and to photograph it. I don’t do it lightly…. I don’t have that thick skin that I should have as a photographer—walk right up and walk right in, you know, the old Daily News approach. Get your picture at all cost. I can’t do that…. If I’m going to photograph somebody, that to me is part of the dialogue. I mean, it’s part of having talked to that person, to have known that person for a few minutes. I’m not going to run up behind him and grab a picture with a long lens. I’m going to sit down and talk to him and say, ‘I want to photograph you. Let’s talk.’ And to me it would be dishonest to do it any other way.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 71