Small Town America - Hardcover

Plowden, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810938421 ISBN 13: 9780810938427

Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1994

Synopsis

An accomplished photographer of the American scene presents a unique artistic record that captures a vanishing part of our country, the main streets, barber shops, schoolhouses, and inhabitants of our small towns. BOMC Div.

About this title

About the Author:

David Plowden is visiting professor at the Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan.

From Booklist:

Plowden is one of America's finest photographers, yet in the library his books seldom appear in the art collection, to which Melvil Dewey consigned photography. They instead turn up in the technology, social science, and history department because Plowden's passion is for the common cultural past represented by old buildings, machines, and furnishings. These he customarily captures in black-and-white, which facilitates seeing them as the traces--their living colors leached away by desuetude--of ways of living, such as those of the small towns that are his concern in this book, that we have too quickly discarded as we have raced toward the glut of material possessions promised by big technology. "The pace at which change is taking place has outdistanced our emotional ability to keep up with it," Plowden avers in his splendid (but poorly proofread) introductory essay. His coolly composed photos of such things as a school cloakroom with a half-dozen parkas and backpacks on its old-fashioned hooks make us feel the burn of the stretch great change has inflicted on American culture; make us feel, too, our ambivalence about that change as does the work of only one other great American artist, Edward Hopper. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0810938421
• ISBN 13: 9780810938427
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160