David Plowden, renowned photographer who sought to capture a ‘vanishing’ America, is dead at 93

With his camera, David Plowden captured images of America that were fast-changing, even disappearing.

The steam-powered locomotives and Great Lakes steamships that gave way to diesel. The small-town mom-and-pop businesses faced with the rise of big-box stores. People working in steel mills as they increasingly were shutting down.

When he wanted to capture images in a small town or on a farm, he’d leaf through the Yellow Pages directory there, then go to bar and chat with people, or he’d go to the town diner, order the special and talk with the people working and eating there.

Building trust, getting to know and understand the perspectives of his subjects — these things were important to him.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2011, he spoke of what drove him.

“It was the feeling that it was very, very important to make a record of this so people could see what we looked like,” he said.

In the late 1970s, he trained the lens of his Hasselblad camera — a boxy contraption he’d place on a tripod — on steelworkers in northwest Indiana. When he’d get home after a day of shooting them and documenting their work, “He’d be covered in soot, and I’d make him take off his clothes at the front door,” said his wife, Sandra Plowden.

“He saw himself as a historian as much as a photographer,” said former assistant Glenn Hansen.

His mantra was: “Staying one step ahead of the wrecking ball.”

“He felt like it was a race against the clock,” said Stephen Serio, his former assistant. “He saw that, literally and figuratively, the American landscape was changing.”

Mr. Plowden died May 4 at a retirement home in Evanston after he had a heart attack in his sleep, according to his family. He was 93.

Over the span of his career, Mr. Plowden published more than 20 photography books. His prints, created in his basement darkroom, were exhibited at museums and galleries around the country. Some sold for several thousand dollars each at the Near North Side Catherine Edelman Gallery, which has since closed.

For many years, he stored his prints in large safe-deposit boxes in the basement vault of a bank in Winnetka.

He moved from New York City to Chicago in 1978 to teach at the Institute of Design, a graduate school of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Commuting from his home in the north suburbs, he later taught at Grand Valley State University and the University of Iowa.

Mr. Plowden would spend days in the field with his students, imploring them to really see the subjects they would photograph, to walk around town, to talk with people long before they were allowed to bring out their cameras.

“The whole idea was to make them totally aware of what was around them,” he said in the 2011 interview. “The camera doesn’t make the photograph — you do.”

Born Oct. 9, 1932, Mr. Plowden grew up in Boston and New York City.

Steam trains captivated him as a kid. In adolescence, once he got a camera, he knew he wanted to photograph them. His mother accompanied him on train trips before sending him on voyages alone, beginning when he was just 12. Over the years, he befriended railroad workers and often was allowed to ride with train engineers.

He also spent a lot of time in Putney, Vt., where his mother’s family had a farm and where he grew to love watching trains and appreciating farm life.

After Mr. Plowden got an economics degree at Yale University, his uncles set him up with interviews for Wall Street jobs. But Mr. Plowden sabotaged the interviews because, he said, his heart was in photography, and he followed it.

At a workshop led by the renowned photographer Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology, White studied a few of Mr. Plowden’s train photos for several minutes without saying a word. Then, he looked at Mr. Plowden and told him, “You have the eye of a poet.”

Mr. Plowden, who was largely self taught, didn’t complete the workshop. He left early to return to his train photos.

“Go do your damned engines,” he said White told him. “Get them out of your system, or you’ll never do anything else.”

In 1968, Mr. Plowden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and later received a research grant from the Smithsonian Institution.

“In all cases, Plowden sought to produce art that transcended the object,” said former WBEZ journalist Steve Edwards, who wrote an introduction to Plowden’s 2008 book “Vanishing Point” and put together an obituary for the family. “He was interested in highlighting the majestic in the mundane and in asking deeper questions about what we create, what we value and what we discard as a culture.”

Mr. Plowden chased projects and published books into his 80s.

When long hours in the darkroom grew to be too much for him to manage, he learned Adobe Photoshop.

“Dad also had a great sense of humor,” said his son, Philip Plowden. “We’d pull up to a toll booth on a family trip, and he’d put on these funny hats, like a raccoon or a moose, and my sister and I would be mortified. But he was having a great time. Or a neighbor boy’s ball would bounce into our yard, and the doorbell would ring, and he’d go, ‘Sure, you can retrieve the ball, just give me a sec, I have to turn off our electric fence. We have a pet elephant back there.’ “

In addition to his son Philip, Mr. Plowden is survived by his wife Sandra Plowden, daughter Karen Plowden, sons John Plowden and Daniel Plowden from a previous marriage, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

A celebration of his life is being planned.