Photographer records dading American landscape

David Plowden pulls on a pair of plastic gloves as classical music and the sound of running water waft softly through a dark and chilly chamber in the basement of his Winnetka, Ill., home. He pushes the door shut to keep away the light and distractions of the outside world. His assistant has measured, mixed and poured the required chemicals. There are fresh bottles within easy reach. Gently, lovingly, the white-haired photographer goes to work, conjuring up the ghosts of a disappearing nation.

What Plowden does in the dark is a vanishing art. He develops and prints his photographs with water and chemicals and an enlarger he's had since 1957. "I'm like a farmer," he says. "I never throw anything out."

Perched on a stool, he sinks a sheet of photo paper into a large plastic tray filled with a clear liquid kept at a steady 68 degrees. Then he leans back, shoves his glasses on top of his head and waits for the spectral images to appear at the bottom of the tray.

"It's pure magic," he says.

So are the haunting black-and-white images the renowned photographer has produced for more than 50 years in darkrooms such as this, pictures of abandoned farmhouses and brittle barns, of train depots once filled with steam and romance, and of landscapes vast and vanishing. "It became a cause," he says of his photography. "I felt we were losing part of our history, part of our identity."

He has been called an archeologist with a camera - a Hasselblad mounted on a tripod, to be exact. He has crisscrossed the country by train and automobile more times than he cares to remember. Some years he has put 60,000 miles on the odometer. "I wore out a fleet of Volkswagen buses," he says. "When I was finished with them they went straight to the scrap heap."

He travels dusty back roads, narrow county highways and pitted city streets to document the simple beauty of the way we were: a general store in Iowa, a drive-in movie theater in Kansas, a once-mighty steel mill on the rusted edge of Chicago.

"I think he sees America as no one has, except in paintings and literature," says historian David McCullough, who has known Plowden since their days together at Yale University in the 1950s. "You see it in (Edward) Hopper and (Willa) Cather. He's in that spirit. He's a poet."

Plowden's advice from the field, from what he calls the "ruins" of America is: Take notice. Appreciate what you have. Don't assume you can come back and find things the way you remember. "So much is already gone," he says with a heavy sigh.

Not that Plowden is opposed to progress or blinded by nostalgia. "I'm not a Luddite," he says. "I would not be alive today without modern medicine. I love the computer. I don't particularly like the idea of using an outhouse."

At 73, he is madly in love with America. Yet he is angry with her too. Disappointed. Worried. "One of the things that upsets me is that we just throw things away," he says. "We walk away and forget."

And so his photographs are both a love song and a requiem. "Sometimes the images are very beautiful celebrations; other times they comment on the destructive hand of man on the landscape and nature," says Corinne Rose, manager of education for the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. "His work has a kind of timeless quality."

One morning a few years back, the telephone rang at the Plowden residence. The Counting Crows rock band wanted to use one of his photographs: a picture of the Statue of Liberty seen from the back through a forest of wires, telephone poles and oil derricks. Plowden took the photograph in 1967, standing with his Hasselblad in a derelict patch of New Jersey. On one of the telephone poles, just above a pile of rubble, is a sign, "No Dumping."

When the young rockers called, neither Plowden nor his wife, Sandra, had ever heard of the group. Hold the phone, please, Sandra said, and hurried to their son's room. She woke him up.

"Philip, do you know who the Counting Crows are?"

"Of course, Mom," he said.

She told him what they wanted.

"That's big time," he said. "Say yes, yes."

Sandra returned upstairs, smiling.

"Ask them for twice as much," she told her husband.

The photograph graces the cover of the Counting Crows' 1998 CD, "Across a Wire: Live in New York City."

Plowden estimates that he has taken about 13 miles of film in producing more than 20 books of photography and commentary. In 1968 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on the bridges of North America. His work resides in the permanent collections of, among other places, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. At the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Plowden prints fetch from $3,000 to $7,500.

His latest book, "A Handful of Dust: Photographs of Disappearing America," was released this spring. It shows images of abandoned feed stores, fading small-town Main Streets and chapels where only three members are left to pray on a Sunday morning. "It's a very sad book," Plowden says. "I hoped I'd never have to do it."

But in recent years, he would return home from a photography trip with beautiful pictures and bad news, which he'd deliver to Sandra over a glass of wine. Remember that wonderful barn? It's gone. That old-fashioned hardware store and that pretty little church and that cozy cafe? Abandoned, boarded up, torn down. Dust.

After decades of documenting a disappearing America he decided it was time to document gone America. "We called the idea `elegy,' an ode to the dead," Sandra says.

So, off and on for the better part of a year, the couple hit the road to photograph this far-flung funerary. Although they had traveled extensively together on vacation, this was the first time Sandra had accompanied her husband as he worked. Early in their marriage they agreed he would not take his cameras on family trips. "I'm never at rest when I have the camera," he says. "Sometimes I think I've never been at rest."

In the 1960s and into the `70s, the early years of his career, Plowden traveled by car and trailer tens of thousands of miles with his first wife, the late Pleasance Coggeshall, and their two sons, John and Daniel, even when the boys were still in diapers. The family camped out during the week and rented a couple of motel rooms on weekends. Plowden would commandeer the boys' bathroom and turn it into a darkroom, spending Saturday and Sunday alone in the dark, printing. "All I wanted to do was to make photographs," he says. "In those days, I wasn't a very good husband or a good father. No wonder she left me."

Plowden and Sandra have been married for nearly 30 years and have two children together, Karen, 24, and Philip, 26. In the beginning of their marriage, Plowden asked Sandra to travel with him while he worked. She refused. "My idea of home was a place," she says. And home is where she and the children stayed. "She was right," Plowden admits.

When Sandra finally started accompanying her husband in the field in 2003 and `04 to gather new pictures for "Dust," their life had changed. The children were grown and Sandra had survived breast cancer. Plowden has survived health problems of his own - heart troubles so worrisome that he isn't supposed to lift even a box of his prints. Time and loss have become personal for them both.

One spring day they drove into Gypsum, Kan., population 414. After days of traveling and taking pictures through the Midwest, his soul was heavy. "I had been back to too many places where there was nothing left," he says. Downtown Gypsum, however, was a relief. It was essentially the same as he remembered it from years before, "save that a few more `teeth' had been knocked out of Maple Street as if it had been in a brawl."

They were on their way out of Gypsum when Sandra spotted an abandoned, unpainted farmhouse. Plowden made a U-turn. He got out of the car and walked around the crumbling house, checking the clouds, the shadows, the fading light, trying to determine the best place to set up his tripod.

After circling the house, Plowden did what he often does. He stopped to listen to the ghosts. They were the farmer's kids, running and laughing in the front yard and their mother, just as his own had done, was calling after them to please stop banging the screen door.

As he began to photograph the old house he was overwhelmed by melancholy and reverence. "I've always had a sense of loss," he says. "I've often wondered if it was because of my father."

David Plowden was born on Oct. 9, 1932, in Boston. Six years later his only sibling, Joan, was born. His mother, Mary, who was raised in Yonkers, N.Y., stayed home with the children. His father, Roger, was an English actor on the New York stage. Before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, the elder Plowden graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the West Point of Great Britain.

The family eventually settled in Manhattan, where Plowden first developed his love of steamships and tugboats and bridges. As a child, he watched the vessels for hours from his apartment window as they plied the East River. Photographing boats and bridges would become one of his professional passions.

In 1940, the scene outside the boy's window changed dramatically. His father wanted the family out of New York City and moved them to a 150-acre farm in Putney, Vt.

It was clear that war was coming, and Roger Plowden enlisted in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant. When the Allies invaded Europe, he landed on Omaha Beach and fought across Europe until the German surrender, rising to the rank of captain.

He was, however, a haunted hero. He had long battled mental illness, and the war only made it worse. Father and son were never close. "David was quite a lonely kid," his wife says.

As lonely boys often do, Plowden went in search of a surrogate father. He found a railroad full of them.

He began hanging around the Putney train depot, and it wasn't long before he knew the train crews up and down the line, men such as Curly Burns, a baggage handler on the Central Vermont, and engineer Bill Cannon and his conductor, Bill Hogan, on the Rutland line a few miles away. They hoisted young Plowden up into the engine cab and let him ride with them. The little boy felt 10 feet tall. "They became my family," he says.

When Plowden was 11, he and his mother went down to the Putney depot so he could take a photograph of the 4:20 coming into the station. As the train got closer, whistle blowing, steam hissing, Plowden began to shake. He handed the Brownie camera to his mother. You take it, he said. He wasn't afraid of the onrushing engine; he was afraid he'd bungle the shot, that he would fail to do the train justice.

A couple of weeks later, Plowden and his mother returned. This time, he stood his ground as the 4:20 steamed into the station. It was the first photograph he ever took. He still has it. "I've never stopped loving trains," he says.

In 1955, after graduating from Yale with a degree in economics, he got a job as an assistant to the train master with the Great Northern Railway in Willmar, Minn. One of his duties was riding with the engine crew. "I had a ball," he says. "When I got promoted to a desk job, I quit."

He returned to New York City where family and friends tried to get him a job on Wall Street. But Plowden had other dreams. "I sabotaged the job interviews," he says. He landed a position as assistant to one of the giants of photography, O. Winston Link, and studied with another, Minor White. He never looked back.

In the 1960s, Plowden and his first wife lived on the fifth floor of a Brooklyn walk-up, where noted photographer Walker Evans was a frequent dinner guest. After the dishes were cleared, the two men would retreat to the bathroom where Plowden had his cramped darkroom. They'd look at photographs and then step outside to watch the evening light. "He'd talk and I'd listen," Plowden says. "I owe so much to Walker."

Plowden tries to repay the debt by teaching. In 1978, a year after he and Sandra were married, Plowden accepted a teaching position at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. They moved from New York City to Winnetka, where at first "David was a fish out of water," his wife says. "There are no crowds. It's quiet."

One of his students was Jim Iska, who today is a photography specialist at the Art Institute of Chicago. "He's an incredibly engaging person," Iska says. "He has this wonderful interest in everyone he talks to. I think that comes through in his work."

When the class ventured out on photographic field trips, Iska says he often knew the picture he wanted to take before his feet hit the pavement. "David would kindly say, `Just look at what you're photographing. Learn from the process,' " Iska says. "His work expresses that. He makes everything that he photographs beautiful."

For the last 18 years, Plowden has taught at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. "I want to pass on all that I know," he says. "I learned from the best. I believe in the continuity of life."

He never uses a flash, and he works only with available light. He loves the waning light of day. As he tells his students, that is when the light is "as rich as chocolate mousse."

He has used a Hasselblad and tripod for most of his career. ("It's steady," he says, smiling. "I drink too much wine.") But one of his best-known photographs he took with a Rolleiflex while lying flat on his stomach.

He was scouting the Scranton, Pa., train depot in 1964, not expecting much, so he left his Hasselblad in the car and put his smaller Rolleiflex around his neck, just in case. But he liked what he saw: steam billowing from the westbound Phoebe Snow, people milling about. It looked like a movie set. He asked the stationmaster for permission to make a photograph.

"Not until I ask the superintendent," the man said, walking away.

No telling how long that would take. As soon as the man left, Plowden climbed onto a baggage truck and quickly shot his photograph. A few minutes later, the stationmaster returned. The answer, he said, was no pictures.

"OK," Plowden said. "I won't send you a print."

Back in Plowden's basement, a decision has to be made.

"What do you want, Mozart or Bach?" asks Jennifer Swanson, his darkroom assistant, who is also a photographer.

"It's always a good idea to begin with Bach," he says.

Plowden uses what is called a "wet darkroom." Most printing today is done with computers in so-called dry or digital darkrooms. "It's like he paints the print with his hands," Swanson says.

He is meticulous. It takes him all day to print just two negatives, one in the morning and one after lunch. On this sunny spring morning in the dark, Plowden is making a new print of an old landscape photograph he took in 1971 east of Las Vegas, N.M. The print is for the cover of his next book, a 50-year retrospective of his work to commemorate his 75th birthday next year.

He slides the negative into the enlarger and a sheet of photo paper into the easel below. He uses his hands to manipulate the enlarger's dim light over the paper to bring out detail and add shadow. Then he puts the paper into the plastic tray of developer and submerges it deeper and deeper, his fingers darting in and out of the liquid. As the image begins to slowly appear-storm clouds, fence posts, endless plains, a lonely blacktop-you see what Plowden means.

It is magic.

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.