Word: plowden
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...successful photographer, David Plowden, 41, has crisscrossed the U.S. on assignments from magazines, book publishers and the Bureau of Public Roads. His favorite subjects, he says, are "our heroic machines and the great though often anonymous examples of our building art." Two years ago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington sifted through a decade of Plowden's work and organized a show of 75 remarkable black-and-white photos. Now these same pictures have been collected in a handsomely designed and printed paperbound book entitled The Hand of Man on America (Chatham Press; $5.95). In a subtle, ironic way, Plowden...
...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...
Children and Their Primary Schools, a 1967 study for the British government by the Plowden Committee describes the progress of British infant schools (for children from 5 to 7 or 8 years old) and junior schools (for children from 7 or 8 to 11 or 12). As cited by Featherstone, the theory of teaching outlined in the Report puts a stress on "...individual discovery, of first-hand experience and on opportunities for creative work. It insists that knowledge does not fall in neatly separate compartments and that work and play are not opposite, but complementary." Featherstone outlines primary school examples...