One day in the early 1940s, David Plowden grabbed his Kodak Brownie box camera and headed to the train depot near his family’s farm in Vermont, accompanied by his mother. He was 11 and fascinated by steam engines — so much so that he often rode the rails and had befriended some of the conductors and engineers.
On that particular day, he looked on in wonder as one of the mighty coal-fired engines approached the station. Such trains were still chugging around the country, although they would soon give way to the diesel locomotive.
But as the train squealed to a halt, he froze, thrusting the camera into his mother’s hands. As he recalled on his website, he told her: “You take the picture!”
It was perhaps the last time he missed the shot.
Renowned for his haunting black-and-white paeans to steam trains and other relics of a fading industrial age, Mr. Plowden died on May 4 at a retirement community in Evanston, Ill. He was 93. The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Sandra Plowden, said.
Unlike O. Winston Link, who was also celebrated for his railroad photography, Mr. Plowden didn’t limit himself largely to trains. His work took in a broad swath of America’s changing landscape in an era of declining industrial dominance.
Starting in 1966 with “Farewell to Steam,” he published more than 20 books of photographs that balanced a vaguely Norman Rockwell-like vision of Americana with moody ruminations on the country’s seemingly endless compulsion to build and then abandon its creations.
“I have been beset with a sense of urgency to record those parts of our heritage which seem to be receding as quickly as the view from the rear of a speeding train,” he once said. “I fear that we are eradicating the evidence of our past accomplishments so quickly that in time we may well lose the sense of who we are.”
A disciple of the Depression-era photographer Walker Evans, Mr. Plowden began in the 1960s to aim the lens of his tripod-mounted Hasselblad camera at soot-encrusted steel mills, Great Lakes cargo ships and other prewar industrial artifacts.
It was a time when American manufacturing was beginning to move overseas and, eventually, to automate. He often joked that he carried out his professional duties “one step ahead of the wrecking ball.”
As Richard Snow, the longtime editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote in the foreword to “Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography,” Mr. Plowden’s 2007 career retrospective volume, “What he has done is nothing less than capture a whole nation passing through 50 years of changes as momentous as those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.”
Along with the relics of heavy industry, Mr. Plowden lovingly documented rural America with its grain silos and weathered barns, which he saw as symbolic of a more honest era of human labor.
“I love photographing gears,” he said in a 2011 interview with HuffPost. “I love photographing machinery that took people to run. There’s nothing more beautiful than a shovel. Did you ever watch anybody shovel coal in a locomotive, or shoveling wheat? It seems almost like a ballet.”
He remained proudly agnostic about trends in fine art photography, with its theoretical overlay, double exposures and motion blurs.
“I’ve been called a ‘straight photographer,’ which is a way of putting me in my place,” Mr. Plowden said in 1999, in a public television documentary on his career narrated by Bill Kurtis. It was a label he embraced.
He did not believe that photographic experimentation — “manipulating things and photographing things for sensation,” as he put it — was the only way to be an artist.
In the documentary, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough, a college friend from Yale, called his photos deceptively “simple.”
Mr. Plowden approached his work as a 19th-century portraitist might have, artfully composing each shot, eschewing extraneous detail and waiting to engage the shutter until the light was precisely right.
As a result, Mr. McCullough said, he made “eloquent photographs.”
David Plowden was born on Oct. 9, 1932, in Boston, the elder of two children of Roger Plowden, a British-born actor and set designer, and Mary (Butler) Plowden, a skilled pianist.
When he was 6, his family moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he recalled staring out the window in fascination as the steamships and tugboats rolled along the East River. (That fascination was reflected in “Tugboat,” a collection of photographs he published in 1976.)
The family spent summers on their farm in Putney, Vt., and David eventually attended the Putney School, a private high school, learning darkroom and other photography skills before graduating in 1951.
He enrolled at Yale, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1955. But the business world held little interest for him, and he decided instead to make a career of photography, taking classes with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Returning to New York City, he met Mr. Evans, who was then a staff photographer and photo editor at Fortune magazine, and would visit him at the Time & Life Building.
“In the evening, we would stand there,” Mr. Plowden told HuffPost, “and here were these huge, massive glass-and-brick buildings, which were part of Midtown New York; he would look at these things and I would realize that he was looking at the shadows.”
It “taught me how to understand that other dimension,” he added, “the architecture of light.”
Over the years, Mr. Plowden’s work appeared in The New York Times, American Heritage and other publications. It is now included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and other institutions.
Mr. Plowden’s first marriage, to Pleasance Coggeshall, ended in divorce in 1976. He married Sandra Schoellkopf in 1977. In addition to her, he is survived by their two children, Philip and Karen Plowden; two sons from his first marriage, John and Daniel; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
In 1978, Mr. Plowden took a teaching post at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and settled in the city with his family.
The surrounding areas of the Midwest proved fertile ground. In 1981, he published “Steel,” documenting a year spent shooting at the Indiana Harbor Works steel mill in East Chicago, Ind.
His renderings of the imperiled small towns and family farms of rural America formed the basis of his final book, “Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie,” published in 2013, when he was 81.
Such images recorded life lived at a smaller scale, with more authentic human connection.
“Wal-Mart has taken over Main Street,” Mr. Plowden said in a 1996 interview with the Winnetka Historical Society of Illinois. “I’m really trying to show what Wal-Mart has destroyed.”
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