Imprints: David Plowden, a Retrospective

by David Plowden

Photographs taken over a period of forty years depict America's vanishing and endangered places, from the wastelands of New Jersey to West Virginia factory towns and a Great Lakes steamer.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821223232
• ISBN13: 9780821223239
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 203 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 11.4" x 10.5"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 and higher

Customer Reviews

Commonplace framed.

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.

An articulate and experienced eye.

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.

Images of small town America and industrial wastelands.

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.

This is an awesome book!

This book rules. David Plowden takes the coolest photos in the world and this book contains some of his best work. It is also beutifuly writen. It deserves to sell more copies then the bible

David Plowden's "Imprint" is a modern classic.

Buy this collection.It is testament to the power of the elegant photographic record,as well as to the subject being recorded. Plowden is The American Photographer.