Remembering David Plowden, Photographer and Former Institute of Design Faculty

As America marks its 250th year, the work of David Plowden offers a different kind of national portrait—not the America of monuments and celebrations, but the America of grain elevators and dying Main Streets, freight trains on ruler-straight horizons, and the empty stages where generations of human drama played out in towns most people drove past without stopping.

Plowden, a photographer whose 22 books and nearly 75-year career documented the vanishing industrial and rural landscapes of this country, died on May 4, 2026, at his home in Winnetka, Illinois. He was 93. The day he died, his exhibition David Plowden’s Iowa—a series of black-and-white photographs shot over four decades—opened at the Sioux City Art Center, where it remains on view through September 20, 2026.

In a 1997 Chicago Tribune profile titled “America the Beautiful,” Plowden described his method as something close to instinct—pulling to the side of the road when something called to him, the way a water dowser follows a rod. He knew he’d arrived at the right place, he said, when he pulled to the side of Highway 2 near Havre, Montana, to photograph a freight train along a ruler-straight horizon. “At 100 cars per train and 40 feet per car, I had almost a mile of train to work with.” He fired three shots. One of them is in his retrospective Imprints. It has been widely described as one of the great photographs of the American landscape.

Plowden came to the Institute of Design in 1978 to teach, bringing with him a practice already shaped by some of the great figures in American photography. He had studied under Minor White and Nathan Lyons, worked as an assistant to the legendary railroad photographer O. Winston Link, and counted Walker Evans as a friend and mentor. At ID he joined a program that had, since László Moholy-Nagy’s founding, treated the camera as one of design’s essential instruments—not merely a recording device but a way of seeing. Among the photographers who passed through ID in those decades were Barbara Crane, who earned her master’s here in 1966, and Victor Skrebneski, who studied here in the late 1940s. The program produced work of lasting consequence.

Plowden’s own practice was driven by what he described as a foundational loss. His career began just as steam locomotives were being retired, and he made it his life’s work to photograph them before they disappeared. “The fact that the demise of the steam locomotive and the beginning of my career occurred simultaneously was a coincidence that determined the course of my life,” he wrote in the preface to Imprints. That initial sense of loss shaped everything that followed: it sent him criss-crossing the country—wearing out 13 cars and seven Hasselblad cameras—to document railroads, steel mills, bridges, grain elevators, tugboats, and small towns, often arriving just ahead of the wrecking ball.

After moving to Chicago in 1978, Plowden documented the city’s industrial landscape for the Chicago Historical Society, giving a fading economy a visual record it might otherwise never have had. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and Yale’s Beinecke Library, where his archive of photographs and papers now lives. Historian David McCullough wrote that Plowden’s photographs “confer a kind of immortality on certain aspects of American civilization before they vanish.”

ID no longer offers a photography program. That shift reflects something Plowden himself understood intimately: disciplines evolve, technologies change, and what was once at the frontier eventually becomes history. Moholy-Nagy recognized the camera as a new technology worth teaching when he founded The New Bauhaus in 1937. In the decades that followed, ID trained photographers who went on to build their own institutions and define their own fields. The principles that animated the program—rigorous observation, attention to what is actually there, the belief that looking carefully is itself a form of knowledge—did not disappear. They migrated into the methods that still define how ID approaches every complex problem it takes on.

As America turns 250 years old, design and designers keeps asking Plowden’s question: What do we lose when a way of making things vanishes, and who will notice if we don’t look? As AI reshapes how things are made and imagined, the loss that looms is not of steam engines or steel mills but of certain modes of human judgment and craft. ID was built for exactly this kind of inflection point—not to mourn what passes, but to look closely enough to carry its lessons into whatever comes next.

Plowden is survived by his wife of 48 years, Sandra, four children, ten grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren—and a body of work that ensures the United States he photographed will not be forgotten.

David Plowden’s Iowa is on view at the Sioux City Art Center through September 20, 2026. Admission is free.