David Plowden: The American Barn [Hardcover]

David Plowden (Author, Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2003

A tribute to the barn by the master documentarian of our time.

As an elemental part of our landscape and our history, barns evoke childhood memories for many of us, recollections of a simpler way of life. Regardless of their size or shape, their forms follow their functions. They are honest. They are beautiful. And they are rapidly vanishing. Across the land we see abandoned farms with barns falling down, being torn down, and only occasionally being converted to other uses. As urban sprawl eats up the countryside and food-producing Goliaths put small farmers out of business, the need for old barns has diminished. For most of his life as a photographer, David Plowden has admired and photographed barns. In recent years, as their disappearance accelerated, he made it his mission to document these beautiful structures, before they too are lost. The result is this beautiful book, his hymn to the American barn. 130 duotone photographs

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

For once, an album of Plowden's superb black-and-white photographs is classified as an art book rather than, because he photographs functional buildings and machines, a technology tome. And perhaps no other Plowden book is as obviously artistic as this display of dairy barns in the northeastern U.S and southeast Canada. The vast planes of barn walls, doors, and roofs, usually set upon vast planes of prairie and against vast planes of sky, inevitably suggest, to art cognoscenti, the formal concerns of cubism and its American realist cognate, precisionism, especially since the latter was developed by painters and photographers. Yes, these pictures look like Charles Sheeler's paintings and photos, but it is doubtful that Plowden had those precedents in mind. His lovely prefatory memoir never mentions other art, and in the acknowledgments, he calls the book "more of a poem . . . an elegy." That is, it fits with the rest of his work, which affectionately, respectfully records a world of work that is vanishing from North America. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

David Plowden is the author of more than twenty photography books, including Bridges: The Spans of North America, Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography, and Requiem for Steam. He lives in Winnetka, Illinois.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393025578
• ISBN-13: 978-0393025576
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 11.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,428,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Just Barns, April 15, 2005

By 

Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: David Plowden: The American Barn (Hardcover)

When I was a child in the city, we always were told that barns are red. I can't remember how many I drew in kindergarten. In later years when I was an aspiring artist, I loved to do pastels of unpainted barns because of the wide range of colors in individual boards. So it has come as a surprise to me that some photographers have decided that their artistic record of the vanishing American barn should be preserved in monochromatic tones. Perhaps the photographers think that black and white is more artistic than color and that these barns deserve artistry. (Most people familiar with the works of today's color photographers would feel that color can be just as artistic.)

David Plowden's book is a collection of such black and white pictures taken of barns across the Northern United States from New Hampshire to Montana, with a few stops in Canada. The pictures are simple shots of barns, both inside and outside. Neither human nor animal appears in any of them. The photographer states that his purpose is to capture these structures before they vanish from the American scene. The pictures are direct and almost confrontational.

Given Americans' long-standing belief that we are an agrarian society, these pictures should appeal to some ineffable feeling in our souls. Clearly this book tells us that it is meant to be art. It's sized for the coffee table, has plenty of white space in the text and often has a blank page opposite a photograph. And yet this book seems curiously lacking in soul, and static. It seems merely a record.

The reason why is quite simple. The range of light in almost every one of the pictures is strangely constricted, as if the pictures were always taken on a cloudy day. Perhaps we've just been taught that black and white photography should cover the full range of light from the deepest blacks to the clearest whites. This is the tradition of fine arts photography passed down to us from the likes of Ansel Adams. Plowden seems to have taken a different path, and it doesn't contribute to his stated goal.

For someone interested in artistic pictures of America's barns that elicit a feeling of loss for the past, I would instead recommend "Harker's Barns", an unassuming soft cover book by Michael Harker, published by the University of Iowa Press. Unlike Plowden's book, this is an undiscovered treasure. And unlike Plowden's work, the pictures have a strong subtext of love for the subject.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gorgeous coffee table book, December 8, 2003

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: David Plowden: The American Barn (Hardcover)

Photographed, compiled, and presented by David Plowden, The American Barn is a grand, black-and-white photographic survey and showcasing of classic barns across America -- many of which are disappearing in an increasingly urbanized world of agribusiness and suburban sprawl. A brief introduction complements a majority of the photos comprising this visually impressive tribute, which is devoted to nothing but full-page photographic images. A gorgeous coffee table book The American Barn is recommended academic and community library photography collections as well as to rural architecture buffs with a special interest in barns.