CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I THINK THAT in many cases—as I was just saying a minute ago—I ask perhaps too much of my audience. I’m asking them to really take the time to look…. To me everything that I see is very important in those pictures, even down to the last blade of grass. And so I demand an enormous amount of myself and I’m demanding an enormous amount, I think, of my audience, maybe too much…. I gave an assignment to my students: I said, ‘Go out and photograph something that’s boring. Go out and photograph the state of being bored—to see if it’s possible.’ Some of them did it beautifully.”
“What did they photograph?”
“Almost all of them photographed something that was very still. A great many of them photographed the classrooms—which I felt made a point. And one of them photographed me!”
It is an overcast, extremely humid morning in August, and David Plowden and I are in his gray Datsun station wagon heading out of Chicago, southbound on the Dan Ryan Expressway. Traffic is heavy in every lane, the air foul with exhaust fumes. Plowden knows the road and drives fast, talking rapidly all the while.
“Every time I go to one of these places it’s as if no one else has ever been there before to photograph it. I really don’t give a damn whether anybody was there ten minutes before…. I want to discover it and work with it and explore it myself. People are always saying to me, ‘Well, where do you think you belong?’ I had an exhibition in Chicago last year. And lots of people came. And one man said, ‘Ah—do you think your work has become more formal because you’ve come to the Institute of Design?’ And I said, ‘Well, if it has, I’m not aware of it, and, moreover, I don’t want to be aware of it; I don’t want to become self-conscious.’ I suppose I always feel that to be concerned with oneself is not really an important thing. I don’t feel that photography is a means of self-analysis. You start analyzing your work and you start asking your students to get themselves on the line all the time about what they’re doing, and where do you lose the magic? And it’s so easy because you become so self-conscious and so intellectual and so analytical about it in the long run that you lose that wonderful sort of ego that you have that says, ‘Oh, goddamn it, I don’t care; I love it anyway; I’m going to do it!’”
South Side Chicago, so painfully different from the splendors of the lakeshore, so removed from suburban Winnetka, where Plowden lives, stretches on endlessly. We pass the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches. It is the famous campus by Mies van der Rohe, and in the dim, colorless light it looks dreadful to me, barely distinguishable from the drab surroundings.
We are off for a day to see “real country,” as Plowden says, “south of Kankakee.” His voice is deep and melodious. He is the son of an English actor and he sounds a little like one himself. “South of Kankakee,” he says now again, happily, theatrically, giving it a ring like a refrain from Kipling.
An hour later, approximately ten miles south of Kankakee on Interstate 57, he turns off at a place called Chebanse, a drab little town on the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. He is driving very slowly now, looking at everything. Halfway along what must be the main street, parallel to the railroad tracks, he pulls into a parking lot beside a grain elevator and lumberyard. The lot is empty except for a dump truck. He gets out and walks slowly back and forth, looking at the elevator and its attendant buildings. He stops, stands still, and, hands in pockets, studies a car parked at the curb beside the elevator, and says he wishes it weren’t there.
He is of less than medium height, about five feet seven, and a little on the stout side. He is wearing khaki work pants and a blue-checked shirt. The pants are about an inch too long and scuff the ground. The whole back of his shirt is dark with perspiration.
He is still studying the scene when the noon siren goes off at the firehouse. A man comes out of the lumberyard office—a tall, angular man in bib overalls who looks Plowden over before taking his lunch pail from the front seat of the dump truck. He and Plowden nod hello, and the man walks back into the office.
There is a nice breeze blowing now out of the north, but the sky is still overcast. “A good day for details,” Plowden assures me. He is setting up a tripod and to this mounts the Hasselblad 500-C, which is his favorite camera. “You know, the hardest thing is to get started. You can rationalize away the whole day and never take a picture.”
He trains the lens on the elevator and part of the street, his eye pressed to the viewfinder, or “chimney.” The car he didn’t like has since departed and been replaced by a dusty pickup that he thinks is just right.
As he works, I get out a notebook and begin an inventory of the street. Directly opposite, on the corner, is the former Bank of Chebanse, a neat gray sandstone building with a silvery TV antenna sprouting from its roof and a green real estate sign hanging in front. Beside it, to the right, is Hanson’s Variety Sundries, then a red-brick café with Stroh’s beer announced in red neon in one window and a small black-and-white sign over the door that says GOOD FOOD. The firehouse is beyond the café.
We are on Chestnut Street, I see by the sign at the corner by the bank. Except for the firehouse, the buildings are one story. Above the trees in the distance is the town water tower, the name Chebanse lettered large in blue.
Other cars and a pickup are pulling into the lot. There is much opening and slamming of car doors as a half dozen men pile out for their lunch break. They are in work clothes and mostly young men, some with full beards. They stop talking momentarily as they look Plowden over, then proceed across the street to the café. He appears wholly unaware of them.
On the far side of the tracks, about fifty yards off, is a line of nondescript frame houses of the kind to be seen in every railroad town across the Midwest, or, for that matter, in any number of photographs by David Plowden. I wonder aloud about what buildings might have stood there in the parking lot in days past. “Something did,” says Plowden. “You may be sure of that. There’s always the feeling that something is gone.”
A bell at the railroad crossing starts clanging, and Plowden, obviously delighted, tells me, “We’re going to have a dividend.” A northbound freight rolls through: four diesel engines pulling what seems to be an endless line of chemical tank cars, empty boxcars, and huge, cagelike cars filled with foreign-made automobiles—108 cars in total, Plowden informs me. “I always count them,” he says. The train was a “mixed consist,” he explains, the automobiles coming no doubt from the docks at New Orleans. The four diesel “units” (not engines) were GP 30’s or 35’s, built by General Motors.
In the café later, he asks a pretty waitress what beer they have on tap. She names three or four brands besides Stroh’s, and he orders a Coke and a hamburger. There is a hubbub of voices from the other tables and a clatter of dishes that he has to talk over. He has the classic long jaw and high color of an English country squire. He leans forward, elbows on the table, directly across from me, his dark eyes sparkling. “Imagine! Less than two hours from Chicago and you’re in country like this—in a town like this. You can’t do that from New York, God knows. The land here is more beautiful than anything I knew in the East. The scale is so enormous. You feel the elements here.” He pauses. “Isn’t it fascinating that the skyscraper developed not on an island, where it was needed, but out here, where there’s infinite space.”
David Plowden is past fifty and he has been on the road the better part of his life. He has traveled by rail and highway, in parlor cars and in the cabs of locomotives when the temperature outside was twenty below, in a VW microbus filled with wife and children, and, more recently, in the gray Datsun, usually alone, a tape deck playing Brahms or Fats Waller (“depending on my mood”). He has seen and photographed hundreds of little backwater places like Chebanse. He loves to talk of days spent in Davy, West Virginia, for example, or Cement, Oklahoma (“That’s Cement,” he stresses) or Eleven Mile Corner, South Dakota, recalling the names of diners and motels and people he met. (“Dalhart, Texas…the man’s name was R. W. Wilier. He said, ‘I’m a leftover of the Dust Bowl!’ He invited me to lunch at his house. We had pork chops. Everybody sat with their hats on. He introduced me to his whole family—said, ‘This fellow’s from New York.’ And that’s about all he said, and everybody sat down and ate pork chops.”) He has photographed roadways and main streets and grain elevators, gas stations, ore docks, river steamers and lake steamers, freighters, ferryboats, tugs, lighters, bridges, power lines, steel mills, coal mines, bars, parking lots, skyscrapers, subdivisions, shopping centers and graveyards, freight yards, freight trains, passenger trains, railroad crossings, railroad stations, and steam locomotives. In more than twenty years of work, he has produced some of the most powerful photographs we have of man-made America and of the Mid-western working farmland he has come to love, it would seem, above everything else.
Much of his work has appeared in magazines, often as special portfolios. Time wrote that his photographs tell more about the nation and its manifest values than reams of reports and environmental studies. He has been exhibited at galleries and universities; he is represented in private collections and museums (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress); he has been compared with Walker Evans, the brilliant chronicler of the Dust Bowl; with the painter Edward Hopper; and with Eugene Atget, the great French photographer of the last century. Like Atget, wrote Owen Edwards in American Photographer, Plowden has found “that the camera is a fine device for the remembrance of things passing.”
But the major display of his talent is in his books. They are the lifework. He has produced eight in which he did both the photographs and the text, the most recent of which, Steel, appeared in 1981, and five others for which he provided the illustrations.
A Farewell to Steam, published in 1966, was the first of those he considers entirely his own, and was followed four years later by the sumptuous Lincoln and His America, in which he also included old photographs. The Hand of Man on America, his most popular book, appeared in 1971. It was based on a major exhibition of his work at the Smithsonian and included the picture he is probably best known for—that of the Statue of Liberty rising, ghostlike, from a weedy, rubble-strewn New Jersey wasteland. (“As a photographer,” he wrote in the introduction, “I have turned to the way I know best to express my distress over our appalling indifference and misplaced priorities.”) Floor of the Sky, about the Great Plains, was published in 1972.
Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974) represented six years of photography and research, financed in part by a Guggenheim fellowship, and some twenty-nine thousand miles of travel. As a visual testimony to the grandeur of engineering and as a concise history of American bridge design and construction, it is unequaled by anything in print, a work of imagination and scholarship that would qualify him as someone of note had he done nothing else. In the most personal of his books, Commonplace, also published in 1974, he abandoned the heroic forms of engineering for ordinary side-street, back-door America, and Tugboat (1976) is an exuberant little book about the doings of the Julia C. Moran and her crew on a single day in New York Harbor.
If one is looking for a repeating theme or dominant symbol in his work, the most obvious is the railroad, and the story of his career, at a glance, would appear to be that of the small boy who loved trains and loved taking pictures of them and so grew up to be an important photographer of all that is linked to the railroad and to that distant day when the steam locomotive dominated the landscape.
In fact, his first attempt at a photograph, at the age often, was of a train. He was waiting with his mother on the platform at Putney, Vermont, but when the train came around the bend—“whistling and puffing and roaring down the river into Putney”—he was so frightened he handed the camera back to her. “You take the picture,” he said. A few weeks later, with a new Box Brownie she had given him, he had better luck.
His first published photograph appeared in Trains Magazine in 1954, when he was still in college. It was of the Great Northern Railroad’s celebrated train The Empire Buldier, and Plowden went to Pennsylvania Station in New York to pick up his first copy of the issue. “I thought everybody in the station should come up and shake my hand,” he remembers, “and I was very disappointed when they didn’t.” His first job after college, the only “regular” job he ever had, was on the Great Northern. “Then when I began studying photography seriously, at Rochester [New York] under Minor White, he told me the first thing I had to do was get my trains out of my system. ‘Go and do your engines,’ he would say. ‘You will never do anything else unless you get those engines done. Now go and leave and do them.’”
But for all he feels still about his engines, for all he knows about the whole panoply of American railroading past and present, this is no mere train buff turned photographer; these are not the photographs of some rather uncomplicated or typical American boy who, in middle age, pines for the nighttime wail of Old 97. David Plowden is a deeply thoughtful, perceptive, complex and often troubled man—also a romantic, also humorous, temperamental, stubborn and brave and contradictory. He both adores and abhors the machines and the industrial spectacle he memorializes in his work. He longs for “real country,” as he says, and yet lives in dread of being “sent off to some awful place where I’m supposed to photograph a moose.” He is a profound patriot—as deeply and sincerely patriotic as anyone I know—and at the same time feels himself an alien in most of the land he travels. He will tell you people are his real interest, yet people rarely appear in his photographs.
Even the small towns that he returns to repeatedly for his subject matter both charm and repel him. “I always feel that I love these towns and I always say, ‘What am I doing here?’ I mean, these places sort of—they give you the feeling as you pass through them—‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’…I never wanted to be in these little places. I’ve always been fascinated by them, but I’m always terribly glad when the train pulls away—I leave them there and I’m on a wonderful train, and I can go to the dining car and have a good meal or a good drink. Or I can get into my nice car and put the camera down and get the hell out of town. I just don’t want to be there—in any of them!”
The devotion and energy he gives his work are extraordinary. In private he will speak of it as a calling or mission. Yet he cares little for “camera talk” of any kind. “I think I know less about photography than I do the things I photograph. I suppose I’d like to feel that I’m a historian.”
He is propelled, driven, by a sense of time running out and the feeling that he must not just make a record, but confer a kind of immortality on certain aspects of American civilization before they vanish. “I feel it’s essential to do it. I feel somehow or other that it’s a mission…that it has nothing whatsoever to do with my own being, but that it’s something quite apart from me. Somehow or other, I happen to have this—whatever the hell you want to call it—talent or gift or obsession or fanaticism or madness or whatever to go out and do this. And, really, it has very little to do with Plowden the family man, or Plowden the friend, or Plowden anything else. I am doing this and I am absolutely consumed with the sense that it has to be done.”
Again and again he has arrived to photograph a certain boat or building or bridge when another week, or even another day, would have been too late. He has photographed the last steam-powered stern-wheel working boat on the Mississippi, the last run on the last day of the Hoboken Ferry. The Scranton railroad station, the SS Algosoo, the old Pittsburgh Point Bridge, are no more. “You know where that is?” he will say, pointing at a photograph of the beautiful Point Bridge. “That’s gone!”
He is not himself of mid-America or anything like it. Born in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, he was raised in an atmosphere of affluence and high liberal ideals in an apartment house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Plowden side of the family has its ancestral base in Plowden, England, where some nine hundred years of Plowdens are buried in the same plot, while his maternal grandfather, George P. Butler, made a fortune on Wall Street around the turn of the century, mainly by merging railroads.
A great-uncle named Reid is said to have brought golf to this country. Another uncle was the American diplomat Ellsworth Bunker, and Grandmother Plowden, a formidable, fearsome figure, spoke five languages, usually picking one you did not know if she wished to put you in your place.
Plowden was born in Boston, not New York, because his parents were on their way to France—and there was a summer place at Putney. Among his earliest memories is being on the train to Vermont and asking his mother over and over, “Are we in real country yet?”
Still, he found his vocation, found himself, in a pursuit of negligible social status and feels his best in the gritty workaday world.
“I have always lived in two worlds,” he explains, and recalls the experience, after Yale, of working on the Great Northern. He had been assigned to Wilmar, Minnesota, ninety miles west of Minneapolis–St. Paul. He was assistant trainmaster on a staff of two and boarded with a family that had a hardware store. But weekends were another matter. His mother had put him in touch with distant relatives who lived in style on Summit Avenue in St. Paul and whose house became his home away from home—“I kept my tuxedo there.” He would come in from Wilmar by freight train Friday nights, shed his work clothes in a locker room, jump in a taxi, and go off to Summit Avenue and the tuxedo and a round of parties, where, as he says, F. Scott Fitzgerald was still alive as far as everybody was concerned.
“I was born—well, not exactly in a tuxedo—but I was born there [on Summit Avenue] in a sense. I loved the parties, sure, of course I did. It was a lot of fun—but I never found the people very interesting.”
He had not found Yale very interesting either, or any of the schools he attended before Yale. In all there were eight—the Home School (“we polished candlesticks”) and the Walt Whitman School, both in Manhattan; Greenfield Hill public school in Fairfield, Connecticut; then a one-room school in Woodstock, New York, where his father was in summer stock; Collegiate, again in Manhattan; Choate, from which he ran away (“I hated it, hated Connecticut; couldn’t stand the smell of burning leaves”); Trinity in Manhattan; and finally the Putney School in Vermont. He was a good student all along, but personally indifferent. At Putney he learned how to use a darkroom.
At Yale he majored in economics, loathing every moment. “A phalanx of uncles had to be coped with. I suppose it had a lot to do with the fact that my father had not been so successful. I felt such an affinity with him—so much more than the others.”
His father, the actor, was the idolized one. Alone of the male side of the family, his father stood by him, insisting he was meant for other things. But his father was also ill much of the time.
His mother, too, Plowden says, was a never-failing source of encouragement. “I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, she would take me out to the railroad yards in Secaucus, New Jersey, and she would sit there all afternoon so I could photograph.”
It was at Yale, in freshman English, that I first met Plowden, though I saw little of him then and sometime later he dropped out, took a year at Columbia. When we ran into each other next, it was in New York nearly ten years later. He was married, living in Brooklyn, and having a difficult time trying to make his way as a photographer.
“A steel mill! There’s nothing more photographable than a steel mill…. To me, it’s the most awesome spectacle we have…. I mean, can you believe it! It’s like a miniature volcano—all contained—made by us…. There’s nothing more terrifying than being in a steel mill. You’ve been in a steel mill; you know what the hell it’s like!”
We are back in the car, continuing south on 1-57. For a while we have talked about favorite books. “Conrad,” he said at once. “All of Conrad. And Willa Cather.” And favorite photographers. He named Paul Strand and Walker Evans. I asked how he felt about Stieglitz. “Funny about Stieglitz—isn’t it awful—but I never liked Stieglitz—never, never…I’ve always felt he was terribly self-conscious. For Christ’s sake, don’t say that around anyone or I’ll be run out of my profession.”
“You’ve already run out, haven’t you?” I said. “You ran out.”
“Yes, I ran out.”
“You never got in?” We were both laughing.
“Listen, I never got in. I’m a heretic. That’s what the man who hired me said. He hired me because I’m a heretic. And he said, ‘I want you to teach your heresy down here.’”
“What’s so heretical about you?”
“Well, I guess I feel that photography is not a holy cow….”
We moved on to favorite painters. “Well—Cezanne,” he said after a pause. “And Monet.” What about the Americans, I asked. “Hopper,” he said. “Hopper, I would say definitely. I actually adore Hopper—I love him.”
Did he think Hopper had been an influence on him? I disliked the question, but felt I must ask.
“No. I have not been influenced by Hopper at all. I think Hopper and I probably love the same things. But I started photographing and doing things long before I was really aware of Hopper. It’s so hard to say whether you’re influenced by someone or not. Of course, you want to say, ‘No, certainly not; I’m my own man, and my own person, of course—I’ve never been influenced by anybody.’ Sure, I suppose I’ve been influenced by Hopper and Walker [Evans] and all those people I admire tremendously. I don’t think you can help it.”
“Are you working in their tradition?”
“I hope so.”
“Carrying the torch?”
“I hope so—in a way. It’s a hell of a torch to carry. Yeah—I hope I am.”
I wondered how much interest he has in films and if he had ever seen any that seemed to be doing what he does. He mentioned Days of Heaven and The Last Picture Show. But when I asked if he had any favorites, he all but shouted with delight, “The Marx Brothers—my favorite of all people in the world. I love the Marx Brothers. I would drive a thousand miles…. I know every piece—I know everything—A Night at the Opera—the scene in the dressing room—the stateroom—where they’re all in there….”
But now we have turned to steel mills.
“It’s like being in hell,” he says. “Absolutely terrifying place! And yet, can you believe that we’ve been able to do that? And look at the goddamn mess it makes of everything! Look what it’s done to the poor guys who work there—look at the pollution, the filth! Look at the bodies of the people who work in these places. And yet, at the same time, these men who work there are intensely proud. And I think there are some who are proud of doing it because they know how goddamn dangerous it is. They’re almost at war. It’s almost like this American thing of always being at war, always having a war to fight. We’re always fighting the frontier; we’re always fighting the mine, trying to get the coal out of the ground. We’re always beating ourselves against things, and I think that’s so much the American spirit. And you get out here and it looks beautiful now, but Jesus Christ, in an hour and a half we might have a tornado, a hailstorm. This guy’s field”—he is pointing to a cornfield to the right—will be laid flat, cut to ribbons. Now he’s pitting himself against it. Look at that water standing in that field there. See that below—he had to replant all that. That was all wasted away….
“The guys at Dessie’s Bar [a place in Virginia that he has photographed], they’re the guys who hack the coal out. There was one guy there whose son took me around, and the son said, ‘My daddy goes in that mine six miles every day and he works on his knees.’And they all have black lung and they all live filthy, goddamn broken lives—they’re all horrible places to work in….
“There’s a picture in the book of a fellow who was slagging the steel—you know, throwing the slag off the top of the ingots with all those showers of sparks; and when he finished, he came rushing out and he ripped open his coat, and he said, ‘Look, mosquito bites, mosquito bites.’ And there were scars from all of the sparks, and he was proud of it—this great guy. These people are heroic. The locomotive engineer…the farmer who is out pitting himself against the weather and against the goddamn bugs and everything else all the time—to me they’re much more real than the guy who makes the money and sits in the office…I find myself more sympathetic to them. I always have…. I suppose it’s also because I can’t imagine anything duller than sitting in an office all day long.”
We have left 1-57 and are cutting cross-country, heading west, inland, on all but empty section roads. “One of my students, a guy from Taiwan, couldn’t believe it when he saw this. I was out here with a class and he wasn’t photographing. He said, ‘I can’t deal with this. I’ve never seen land like this.’”
The road is as straight as a landing strip and walled in on both sides by corn eight feet high, higher, mile after mile after mile. When the road rises and there is a break in the corn, we can see enormous distances—six, maybe ten miles; I can’t tell because the scale of everything is so different. I feel like the student from Taiwan. There are no fences and the few houses barely show above the corn.
“All right, David,” he explains. “This is the Corn Belt! Right in the middle of it!”
He wants to stop and get out, but he is waiting for another rise where we can see. We are doing about sixty. It is beginning to look as though the sun might break through for the first time all day. A grasshopper, or something, splatters against the windshield. A soybean field appears suddenly on the right. In the middle, maybe five hundred yards from the road, a lone, small figure of a man is working with a hoe. Then, as abruptly, he and his field are gone, and we are in corn again.
There is a lot of blue sky suddenly. And now the sun is out and brilliant beyond expectation, changing the look of everything. Plowden likes the change. “All the time, the whole thing is light,” he says. “And the light out here…well, look, from one horizon to another, it’s the sky.”
The air rushing past the window is noticeably hotter, but I am struck even more by the smell. I have smelled growing corn before but never anything like this.
“And just listen,” says Plowden, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “It doesn’t make any noise…you’d think that anything that was in such abundance would yell.”
A sign says that what we are seeing is Lester Fister’s Hybrid Corn.
We hit a long, slow rise and at the crest, at a crossroad, he pulls off on the shoulder. We are at the junction of 400 East and 2200 North, according to an incongruous street sign.
We get out, and the wonderful smell is nearly overpowering. I hear an airplane faintly in the distance. Otherwise there is little or no sound. Again we can see for miles, the roads running off exactly to the four points of the compass. We are immersed in corn smell and silence and Illinois summer. A mile up the road the sun is hitting what must be a metal barn roof. In nature there are no straight lines, I seem to remember reading somewhere, and here everything runs straight—roads, fields, roof lines—yet you feel an elemental force in the corn itself, as if the land has never really been tamed.
I check my watch. It is two-fifteen, less than twenty-four hours since Plowden met me at O’Hare.
His face is alight with pleasure, “We’re ‘smack dab in the middle of the country,’ as Sandra says. No matter which way you look, it’s America.”
Sandra, his wife, is the former Sandra Schoellkopf of Buffalo, whom he married five years ago after an earlier marriage—to Pleasance Coggeshall—ended in divorce. Plowden has four children, two grown from his first marriage, a young son and daughter from his second marriage.
He must have a souvenir of this spot, he announces. I think he means to pilfer a green ear of Lester Fister’s Hybrid. Instead he is setting up for a picture. “You know, half the pictures are souvenirs.”
He talks now while he works, only it is talk broken by periodic pauses, sometimes in midsentence, so that it comes out like this:
“Hear the cicada?…The light…is certainly going to…be possible…in about two seconds…. Clouds are like pieces of concrete…. Is that car coming or going?…I can’t tell…. Now hear the rustle…when the wind starts. It’s almost eerie…out here…when you’re by yourself…and the wind begins to blow on the corn.”
It is an impossible picture, he concludes. There is no way to convey the sensation of such space. I am sure he is right.
Half an hour later we are in Gilman, again on the Illinois Central Gulf, and he has already made several shots from a spot beside Jed’s Yazoo Mowers (“Sales and Service”), where Main Street crosses the tracks. There is more to Gilman than Chebanse. A James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, is playing at the Palace up the block. There is a Ben Franklin, a Montgomery Ward. Plowden is concentrating on the stark, silver-gray side wall of Roeder’s Hardware, which is in the immediate foreground. I ask what he meant when he said clouds are like pieces of concrete.
“When you get that great white blob up there”—he points to what seems to be a perfectly beautiful cloud hanging over the store—“in a still black-and-white picture, it’s going to be just as important as that car that’s moved in there”—in front of the store—“and it’s going to make just as much difference as that white car”—farther off down the street—“in the whole composition.”
He likes this corner. The words Roeder’s Hardware are painted in elegant old style across the upper left-hand side of the blank wall. “It’s just fun. It’s just pure fun! I mean, it’s a wonderful sign. And a wonderful old tin building and this funny old main street…and the window makes it [a small first-floor window on the right]…. I can’t resist it. You know what I really love about doing this? In a sense I preserve this little place—I caught it, and it won’t disappear. It’s been held. There’s something about this particular moment, this particular unique little corner—and it’s not going to go. I love that feeling; I love that feeling of getting this place. You know, when you talk about everything disappearing and time going by and…it’s sort of a nice feeling to think that even if that tin place burns down like that building in front of the town up there”—he has seen something I haven’t—“maybe, maybe these pictures will be preserved just the way we have all of those pictures from other times that somebody else took the trouble to do. And to me, to be part of that tradition is very, very important.”
Several minutes pass and nothing is said. Two or three more cars have pulled in and parked near the front of the store.
“Now, you see how it works with all those cars lined up…you see, the single car there didn’t work out at all.” He makes several more shots. “I really love that feeling…to hold, to preserve some of this. You’re seeing me at home. This is my turf. This is the kind of thing I would rather do than anything else. I always just gravitate to these old sort of…always along the railroad and always out in this country. It’s home—I just poke around.”
We pay a call at the Gilman Star and introduce ourselves to the editor and publisher, George Elliott, who stands at the front counter with us chatting about crops and Gilman and his paper. He bought it soon after the Second World War and has been doing “just fine.” We buy two copies and leave, Plowden having taken no pictures of Mr. Elliott or his office and having said nothing about being a photographer.
“I always feel it’s a terrible imposition,” he says afterward in the car. “If I had taken his picture he would have become a character. We were equals at the time.”
I ask if this is the sort of day he would be having if he were alone. Yes, he says, except that about now he would find a cool spot in a graveyard somewhere and take a nap.
We continue west, never out of corn country, except in the little towns. Plowden studies the sky and predicts perfect light by evening. At Piper City he slows to a crawl—looking, looking, looking. “These towns are like postage stamps. They’re just pasted down on the land.” We pass a playground under shade trees, a nice old house with a big screened porch. “Piper City,” he says softly. “Look at this one right here…the house behind the iron fence…that’s a marvelous house. It’s after 1870…because look at the panes of glass, in fours.” A smaller house with some young girls sitting on the porch looks, he says, like the house Ronald Reagan lived in in Dixon, to the northwest. “Piper City,” he repeats again.
At Chatsworth he likes what he sees enough to get out and walk around. We go into a junk shop. He is interested in souvenir ashtrays, and he finds three he likes, as well as some postcards and a rusty outdoor thermometer with a crack in the glass. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. William Durante, strike up a conversation. We learn that they once owned the Biograph in Chicago, the motion picture theater where Dillinger was shot and killed. It explains, they say, the pictures they have hanging of Dillinger and FDR. A vacant movie house across the street is also theirs and also, like the pictures of Dillinger and FDR, for sale. We all study it through the window. The price is $15,000, they tell Plowden. It is his chance to make a killing in show business, says Mrs. Durante, and we all laugh, Plowden the loudest.
At Forest, where we get gas, he reports that we have driven 170 miles, and we start south on Route 47, a two-lane cement road that he considers one of the most beautiful roads in America.
“The shame is, most people never travel a road like this, never see this kind of country, or, if they do, don’t bother to look because it’s not their idea of scenery.”
In another hour we have passed through Strawn and Sibley and detoured to circle an idle line of freight cars, Plowden trying and failing to get an angle he likes. We have been off on a dirt road between empty fields, scaring up hundreds of small bright yellow butterflies—sulphur butterflies, according to Plowden—and we have swung back onto 47, heading straight through to Gibson City.
“I remember once in a dining car, the steward had all the shades pulled down, and we were going across Kansas or Oklahoma, someplace along there. And I pulled up the shade—and I was almost the only person in the car—and the fellow came by again and pulled the shade down. He said, ‘There’s nothing to see out there, son.’ He said, ‘It isn’t worth looking at.’ I was outraged. I pulled it up, figured I was a patron. But I think so many people feel that way about this country—that it isn’t worth looking at. And they’re the people who don’t know it. I think the people who live here love it. But I think people who don’t know aren’t aware of this. You know, they’re going to the Rockies or they’re going to Sun Valley, or they’re on their way to ski or to see the Grand Canyon. It’s so sad…I used to call up the AAA—used to be a member—and ask them to route me someplace, and then I would go the other way. I still feel that way.”
Gibson City disappoints him. Gibson City has dressed up its Main Street. Somebody has sold its merchants on the idea of visual uniformity. Instead of the usual chaos of signs, every shop and store is labeled in the same orange lettering on a milk-chocolate background. “Suburban. Awful,” Plowden mutters, and we swing north and east on Route 54, which will take us back to 1-57.
The light on the fields and distant farm buildings is beautiful beyond anything we have seen all day. Ahead, according to the map, is Roberts. It will be our last stop, Plowden decides.
“What are the principal aggravations of your work?”
“Aggravations? My own shyness.”
“What a wonderful answer.”
“My own feeling of reticence to go and say, ‘Here I am. I’m here to photograph your land.’ You know, ‘Taking a little bit of your home—a little bit of your soul. I want to steal a little bit.’ I feel that way. I feel a terrible imposition. I feel that it’s a tremendous privilege to go to somebody’s place and to photograph it. I don’t do it lightly…. I don’t have that thick skin that I should have as a photographer—walk right up and walk right in, you know, the old Daily News approach. Get your picture at all cost. I can’t do that…. If I’m going to photograph somebody, that to me is part of the dialogue. I mean, it’s part of having talked to that person, to have known that person for a few minutes. I’m not going to run up behind him and grab a picture with a long lens. I’m going to sit down and talk to him and say, ‘I want to photograph you. Let’s talk.’ And to me it would be dishonest to do it any other way.”
“What part of it is drudgery? Any of it?”
“Yes. A lot of it is drudgery. A hell of a lot is drudgery. The developing of the film is sheer, absolute donkey work. All of the business of after the prints are made and having to go through all of the hypo and the second hypo and the hypo eliminator and all of the washing and the drying and the spotting of the pictures to remove the dust spots that you couldn’t remove—you know, that you couldn’t get off the film. All that to me is just rote work. You know it and you do it, but it’s not interesting, except that you know you’re making something.”
“What else?”
“Driving. Long distances by yourself. And it seems as if I spend almost more time sitting behind the wheel of a car than anything else.”
“Overnight stays?”
“Oh, Jesus—in motels! That’s the worst of all…. The only thing that sustains me is to get to the motel to call Sandra. You know, ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m here.’ The first thing I give her is my phone number, just to know she knows…and to me those are desperate moments.”
Roberts is still another tiny tree-shaded country town and, by the looks of its vacant store windows, very nearly dead. But with the light the way it is now, there is something almost magical about Roberts. Main Street is short and wide. There is not a soul to be seen and no cars on the street now other than our own. A child’s wagon is standing alone on the sidewalk. It all looks like a stage set. The late evening sunshine glows on the dingy, old storefronts like theatrical lighting.
Plowden loves it and gets right to work, showing no sign of fatigue. He moves the camera and tripod from point to point up the side of the street where the wagon stands. He is shooting steadily. I walk on the other side, where I won’t be in the way. I think of the stories of Wright Morris and of Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall. I think of something Plowden himself wrote in his preface to Commonplace—that we will not find the look of America in places like Williamsburg or Virginia City, Montana. “Only actors will we find, and a set designed by wishful thinking.” And there he is across the street, the actor’s son working on what is so plainly an empty set, albeit of another kind.
Only last night, in his study at Winnetka, as we were looking through some of his prints, he was talking about the people in a photograph in which there are no people. “It speaks of people,” he said. “That street speaks of all the people who were there—always. And I want people…I want them to hear their own footsteps as they walk down that street and to occupy that particular space without my filling it with characters. Because I think you would be more interested in them—the characters—than in their space. But if the space is there…the street is there by itself…I think you will occupy it. It’s like a stage set, you become the actor.”
It is seven-fifteen. But it is another half hour before he stops and we go. The sun now is a crimson ball above the corn fields. “Oh, I love this light,” he says. “This is the time I love. You really feel the earth turning.”
I am assuming that that is it for the day, but ten miles farther along he sees a square white barn tucked among the corn to the side of the road, and he brakes and stops.
The barn won’t work for him, he decides after we are out of the car. The picture is on the other side of the road, the panorama to the west, where the sun is very nearly down. We are standing in the grass on the shoulder. Another car speeds past. He gets the camera and tripod.
The temperature has dropped and the smell of the corn in the cooler air is even more wonderful than before. Birds are flying overhead—veering specks too high for me to know what they are—and the sky is very pale, nearly colorless, turning pale pink down near the band of soft gray-green haze that marks the horizon. The trees there, on the horizon, and a scattering of farm buildings and a silo seem to float in the haze, suspended and unearthly, as if in a mirage. And it is this, the long fading horizon, that Plowden is shooting, the shutter of his camera making one slow clunk after another.
“That’s the one,” he says, back behind the wheel of the car. “That’s the photograph, the best.”
“Of the day?”
“Of the day.”
About nine, at a roadside restaurant beside 1-57, just before Kankakee, he calls Sandra to say we are on the way home.