Imprints: A Retrospective [Hardcover]

David Plowden (Author, Photographer), Alan Trachtenberg (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997

From trains and bridges to small town steel mills and steamboats, David Plowden has devoted his career to memorializing the vestiges of America's industrial and rural past. This volume looks back over his career, selecting the best of his work recording the struggle between civilization and nature.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

After four decades and 19 books chronicling America's small farms, forgotten towns, and aging industrial symbols (see, e.g., Small Town America, LJ 7/94), Plowden's artistry and anger are undimmed. His pictures have always been exquisite acts of salvage. "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 the rest of my life," Plowden writes. These 170 black-and-white prints from 40 years show Plowden in all his fields of study?from the New Jersey wastelands and West Virginia factory towns to a Brooklyn, IA, rooming-house; the plume of a Great Lakes steamer; the drama of an Indiana blast furnace; or the weathered beauty of a church door in New Diggings, WI. Keeping "one step ahead of the wrecking ball," he has wandered a heartbreaking landscape of endangered places and snapped much of it before it vanished. An excellent introduction to Plowden's beautiful work; highly recommended.?Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 203 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch Pr (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821223232
• ISBN-13: 978-0821223239
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 10 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,403,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Images of small town America and industrial wastelands., September 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Imprints: A Retrospective (Hardcover)

David Plowden has spent a lifetime taking his camera into small towns and down the backroads between them trying to capture an America that has almost completely vanished. We are fortunate that he arrived in time with a wonderful sense of composition that invests his black and white photographs with grace and beauty. This retrospective collects the best of these images into a cohesive photo essay of small towns, lonely farms and abandoned railroads. Placed against these small and quiet images are Plowden's photos of brutal industrial and mechanical structures. These nightmare images of factories and elevators and rail yards, draped in smoke and soot, make us as uneasy in turn as the rural photos made us nostalgic for the old ways. Plowden can cross between these two worlds so easily because they are really two sides of the same American coin. His brilliant photograph of a dark, brooding steel mill at the end of a grimy residental street combines the best and worst of the American dream. Plowden clearly would return to the simple small town days, but he has seen enough to understand that we are too far down the other path to turn back now. The photographs in this book are heartfelt. Some are very sad, and some impart a terrible sense of unease - as though we have stumbled onto an ugly secret. Plowden can take his place next to Walker Evans and Wright Morris with this book. He has captured our lost America and, for better or worse, marked the way into the new century.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An articulate and experienced eye., December 8, 1999

By 

Dale Bentson "bentmax" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imprints: A Retrospective (Hardcover)

Imprints is a wonderful representation of the America of our fathers and grandfathers that will soon exist no more, for better or worse. The photographic record in Imprints speaks wonderfully of the articulate and experienced eye of David Plowden. His images depict the unglamorous parts of life that most of us grow up with. Yet, at the same time, his keen vision shows us that there is beauty and art in everything. I grew up in the American Midwest in the 1950's and this book elicits nostalgia, sentimentality and a sense of loss. I wish I had been more observant, aware, appreciative at that time. Plowden has given me a second chance.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Commonplace framed., July 14, 2002

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imprints: A Retrospective (Hardcover)

This beautifully produced book of 170 black and white photos by David Plowden, taken between 1956 and 1992, captures everyday man-made America before it vanishes, railroads, steamboats, farmland, small towns, bridges and the subject I like best, the grittyness of the US industrial city. Each page photo has a generous border and a caption centred below.

All the photographs are wonderful compositions, many of them divided into threes, horizontally, some land in the foreground, then a freight train and finally the sky. This is interesting because they show things that could not be moved, unlike studio photography, here the photographer had to move the camera to get the best shot. David Plowden seems to know instinctively when he sees something that it will make an interesting photograph. If you want to have a keepsake of slowly disappearing man-made America get this book.