Imprints : David Plowden: a Retrospective

From trains and bridges to small towns, steel mills, and steamboats, David Plowden has devoted his career to memorializing the vestiges of America's industrial and rural past.

In his photographs and writings, he explores the beauty, power, blight, and significance of these once commonplace icons and vistas -- and captures the visual texture of a bygone America on the verge of vanishing.

His work is clear-eyed, rigorous, and ultimately ambivalent rather than nostalgic; steel mills, for instance, are "at once magnificent and apocalyptic -- a definitive expression of mankind's inherently productive and creative, as well as destructive, nature".

This book, published in conjunction with retrospectives opening at Yale University and in Buffalo, looks back over Plowden's entire career and presents the very best of his work.

From the abstract intricacy of bridge struts to the subtle undulation of wheat in a field, the 170 dramatic black-and-white photographs presented here -- of towns, cities, trains, mills, and other all-American subjects -- brilliantly record the struggle between civilization and nature, old and new.