Floor of the Sky: The Great Plains (A Landform book)

by David Plowden

Book Overview

The photographs were shot during 1970-71 across all of the Great Plains states from Montana south to New Mexico and Texas. There's a great variety of images impossible to summarize here, including... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871560631
• ISBN13: 9780871560636
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Sierra Club
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 2.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking images of wide open spaces

So many great books of photography are out of print. Here's another one. If you can get your hands on a copy somewhere, hang onto it. The photographer, David Plowden, has a wonderful sensitivity for the vast sweep of this landscape and the big sky. While there are a few 2-page spreads that reach for the breadth of spaces on the open plains, most of the photos are square or very nearly so, and Plowden is a master of images framed in these proportions. For example, a photograph taken in what looks like late afternoon captures a deserted dirt street in Carter, Montana. Stretching straight ahead to the edge of town, the street is wide as the bottom frame of the picture and in the course of two blocks quickly narrows, then ends, and beyond in the middle distance to the blue, range of far-off mountains are gently rolling, golden fields, under a milky blue sky. The buildings on both sides of the street turn blank, windowless walls to the camera, and a white General Mills elevator rises above the rooflines. Beside it stands the criss-crossed arms of a railroad crossing sign. Along the street there are utility poles and wires running overhead. In the foreground the street has been oiled to settle the dust, and grass grows right to the edges. There's not a sign of human life. The picture evokes a vast open stillness and an air of time suspended.The photographs were shot during 1970-71 across all of the Great Plains states from Montana south to New Mexico and Texas. There's a great variety of images impossible to summarize here, including white markers in the grass of the Little Big Horn, a full moon over bluffs, sunsets, abandoned farm buildings, vacant store fronts, cars and trucks parked in front of a bar, wheat fields, hay fields, windmills, an old tractor, railroad tracks, an endless freight train, riverbeds and dry water holes, stormy skies, badlands, the faces of rural people, and the backside of one cowboy sitting on the top rail of a fence. Plowden has caught the Great Plains in all kinds of moods and conditions, and the images just take your breath away. The book also has a considerable amount of text. Being a Sierra Club publication, there is a sense of both loss and anger at the failure of humans to be more respectful of the earth. A section called "The Short grass and the big sky" describes the terrain, climate, plant and animal life. A longer section follows called "The way it was when the way was west," providing a history of the area's immigrants, beginning with the Spanish. The final section, "The way it is," describes life on the Great Plains as Plowden found it in 1970-71, and the book introduces several people he talked to, including farmers and ranchers. The photographs are mostly color; some are black and white. The title is from Willa Cather, who described the Great Plains as "the floor of the sky." I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this part of the American West. Plowden has a wonderful eye and clearly a fascination