Word: plowden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BRIDGES: THE SPANS OF NORTH AMERICA by David Plowden. 328 pages...
...have to support the added burden of Unking the present to the past. In all their various lengths and styles, these vastly expensive monuments to man's ingenuity and perseverance combine the most basic usefulness with a beauty that commuters have long since taken for granted. Photographer David Plowden provides the pictures and historical text that should restore the balance of awe and respect due these structures...
...Plowden starts innocently enough by depicting the vast sweep of prairie spaces, made human-and eloquent-by scattered farmhouses and fences. Man's hand is clearly benevolent there. Soon another marvelous photo captures a church on a cross-crowned hill. Despite its almost biblical overtones, the scene is catapulted into the present by the true nature of the crosses-actually a telegraph pole and a highway sign -and by adjacent State Highway No. 7, apparently a road to nowhere. Which is really the more important, the photo seems to ask, road or church...
...lovely Owens Valley, an empty parking lot behind a blank-walled movie theater in Paramus, N.J., an ugly carwash building in Lorain, Ohio. Each photo is as carefully composed as a painting by Edward Hopper, and disappointment clearly shows in each. Turning to the great achievements of the past, Plowden finds little consolation. The splendid ferries and mighty iron bridges that he loves to photograph are obsolescent and vanishing. In Lordville, N.Y., he shows a once proud but now decaying house by some railroad tracks; it serves as a melancholy reminder of a grander and gentler...
...Plowden's cumulative point seems to be that carelessness and mobility have become the great American characteristics at the expense of beauty, permanence, humanity. He sums up his attitudes in a picture of the Statue of Liberty with its back turned on a desolate scene in Jersey City...