Grohmann Museum’s ‘Architecture of Agriculture’

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Photo: davidplowden.com

'Grain Elevators, Carter, Montana, 1971' by David Plowden

'Grain Elevators, Carter, Montana, 1971' by David Plowden

Starting in the 1950s, David Plowden set forth to photograph a vanishing America. He started with steam locomotives, fast being supplanted by diesel. Then he documented the older bridges that carried freight and passengers and the steel mills that produced the material from which American industrial goods were forged. Along the way, he photographed some of the people he encountered in his road trips through the northern half of the United States.

Now, for his fifth exhibition at the Grohmann Museum, Plowden, who turned 90 last October, curated a collection of photographs taken in farm country, “The Architecture of Agriculture.” “It’s an extension of his previous work with us,” says James Kieselburg, the museum’s director. He adds that the Grohmann, along with Plowden’s alma matter, Yale University, has become a major repository for his photography.

Describing Plowden’s choices of subjects, Kieselburg says, “He wanted to capture these things while they still existed. He always said he was one step ahead of the wrecking ball.” And that included the human-built rural scenes collected in “The Architecture of Agriculture,” whose buildings and artefacts speak for the network of family farms already fraying and diminishing when Plowden began photographing them in the early ‘70s.

Plowden often calls to mind such archetypal documentary photographers of everyday life during the Great Depression as Walker Evans. Plowden’s work is imbued with a spirit similar to that era’s New Deal, WPA artists with their validation of working-class America and embrace of industry, including the factories and farms that supported the nation’s great experiment in democracy. The important difference is that those 1930s artists extolled the present while Plowden reflected on the past.

Although he chose to work exclusively in lustrous black and white, Plowden was among the most painterly of photographers as attested by many photos included in “The Architecture of Agriculture.” In North Deep River, Poweshiek County, Iowa, 1986, the roll of the land can almost be felt amid the inclines and contrasting textures of the crop fields. In Farm Near Peotone, Will County, Illinois, 1981, the rough edges of a gravel road cut through dark fields, splitting the farm property in two. The low horizon is occupied on one side by grain silos and on the other by a white farmhouse with a steep pitched roof and a few bare trees.

With composition and content, Carter, Montana, 1971 masterfully represents its bleak setting: a feed mill with a Great Northern railroad car pulled alongside, a farmer’s co-op and the horizontal train tracks and vertical phone poles forming a Euclidean geometry of lines across a low-slung horizon capped by the distant edge of the Rocky Mountains. On Chateau County, Montana, 1971, an inky black asphalt road recedes into the horizontal furrows of grey fields broken by vertical road signs and phone poles. Antelope, Montana, 1971 is the perfect picture of ruin. Dominating the setting is the faded WJ Jennsion Co. Sweet Cream Flour tower, a paint-peeled structure, and a Northern Pacific freight car, abandoned to rust, enhancing the sensation of a forgotten land.

Using only natural light, Plowden’s photography is not the random snapshots from a passerby, but the work of an artist determined to identify with, and discover the essence of, the scenes he composed from the raw material of reality. Each picture has a story to tell, maybe several stories left to transpire in the imagination of each viewer.

“The Architecture of Agriculture” is up through Aug. 20 at the Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway. For more, visit the Grohmann Museum website.

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