David Plowden, American industrial photographer, died on May 4 at age 92. Besides his iconic B&W images of trains, steel mills and taconite mines, he was also known for documenting some of the last operating Great Lakes steamboats, published in a book fittingly titled “End of An Era.” Plowden captured not only the old steamers, but the heart of them, giving ordinary Americans a rare glimpse inside the vessels and crews, paying special attention to the firemen and old coal-fired steam engines that are almost extinct on the lakes today.
Among the 22 books that he wrote, Railfan & Railroad readers probably know best Farewell to Steam (1966), A Time of Trains (1987), and Requiem for Steam (2010), but Plowden’s oeuvre also included definitive volumes on other subjects, including Lincoln and His America (1970) and Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974, reprinted 10 years later).
David Plowden.
Born in 1932, Plowden spent much of his childhood in New York City. Throughout his youth, he rode trains in the New York area, in New England, and across the U.S., and he made friends with enginemen and train crews. He reached adulthood and chose to make a living as a photographer in the 1950s, a decade defined in railroading by dieselization.
In the preface to his 1997 retrospective book Imprints, Plowden wrote, “I was born astride two eras. The fact that the demise of the steam locomotive and the beginning of
my career occurred simultaneously was a coincidence that determined the course of my life. It was that initial sense of loss – and perhaps that my father died later the same year [1960] – that greatly influenced the way I view the world. It also made me keenly aware of photography’s unmatched ability to preserve the moment and, thereby, to capture things on film before they disappeared.”
Plowden began his photography as a railfan: He made his very first photo, at age 11, of a steam locomotive leading a Boston & Maine passenger train into Putney, Vermont, near the summer house that his well-to-do parents had bought a few years earlier. Capturing steam before it disappeared drove Plowden’s efforts for more than 15 years and even led him to apply for his first job after college as a management trainee on the Great Northern Railway. Assigned as assistant to the trainmaster at Willmar, on the Minnesota prairie, the
Cover of Plowden’s End of An Era. [Ryan Mihalak]
Before going out on his own, Plowden spent about four years studying photography and working for established professionals, first as O. Winston Link’s assistant in 1958-59; Plowden accompanied Link on a number of trips to document the Norfolk & Western. He also spent time as a student of Minor White’s in Rochester, N.Y., and learned invaluable lessons that stayed with him throughout his later career. In an interview for the afterword to David Plowden’s Iowa (2012), he said, “I never saw such prints as Minor made. And I can remember Ansel [Adams] came . . . and the two of them were in the darkroom together one day . . . . There was great rivalry there. I felt that I was in the darkroom with Poseidon and Zeus. One was throwing tridents, and the other was throwing thunderbolts. They were arguing the points of order. And here were these two great, great printers – some of the greatest printers who ever lived – arguing. Imagine being in the corner listening to this.”
With the steam era effectively over, Plowden realized that his work as a photographer had just begun. Continuing in the Imprints preface, he wrote, “It began to dawn on me that I hadn’t simply been documenting steam locomotives in their final hour. I was witnessing something of far greater consequence: the transformation of a culture. In this light, the body of my work depicts an America almost unrecognizable from the one that I began photographing 40 years ago. The urgency to record has become ever more imperative as I have tried vainly to stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball.”
Plowden’s subjects over time came to include steamboats, bridges, barns, steel mills, and all aspects of the rural Midwest, including its people and their homes. After tens of thousands of miles of traveling by car from coast to coast while researching and photographing for Lincoln and Bridges, Plowden moved from Long Island, New York, to suburban Chicago in 1978, and he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for a few years, then for a few more at the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism. Plowden loved Iowa, and all of the Great Plains. “I think I have more pictures of Iowa than any place. Quite seriously,” he said in Iowa. From 1988 to 2007, Plowden served as a visiting professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
Although not a “railfan photographer” in the same mold as his contemporaries Phil Hastings (born in 1925), Richard Steinheimer (1929), Jim Shaughnessy (1933), and J. Parker Lamb (1933), Plowden maintained close ties to Train World. A friend of Center for Railroad Photography & Art founder John Gruber (born in 1936), he presented at a number of the CRP&A’s Conversations conferences, including the first one, and the Center has a traveling exhibition of prints that Plowden donated to the organization; entitled “Requiem for Steam,” it has visited almost a dozen venues from California to Connecticut since 2010. More than 40 years after graduating from Yale University, in 1995, Plowden arranged for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to become the repository of his complete archive, including negatives, prints, slides, journals, audio tapes, and more. Learn more about Plowden’s life and work here.
