Photographer David Plowden—now 92—has spent his long career traversing the United States to find subjects for his black-and-white photographs. At age 11, he received a Brownie reflex, his first camera, and began taking pictures of the steam trains that crisscrossed his home state of Vermont. As steam trains were replaced by newer technology and Plowden documented their last days, his career photographing vanishing people and places took shape. By the Wayside surveys major subjects in Plowden’s work, including trains, ships, bridges, farms and fields, steel mills, and the people who lived and worked across the US. Each image is a detailed, melancholy tribute to the recent past, picturing industries and places that are quickly disappearing. Plowden writes that “I have spent my life glorifying works of an age past… I have tried to enshrine them with an immortality before they vanish.”

At the same time, however, Plowden’s photographs are not nostalgic or naive. Rather, taken together, the photographs evoke a sense of ambiguity and ambivalence, acknowledging the ways that America’s endless pursuit of industrial progress can “as easily turn against humanity as serve its needs,” leaving behind “a trail of waste, the rape of Appalachia, and the dreary, gray mill towns…” Plowden, who often writes reflections about his photos, describes the rise and fall of American industries as bittersweet—he sees these industries as high points of human achievement as well as forms of violence that leave behind scars and painful memories. Midwestern farms fed the country and the world while also irrevocably altering the prairie. Steel mills created bustling towns and good jobs but at the price of polluted air and streams and nightmarish working conditions. In this way, Plowden’s photographs ask us to consider our country’s—and our—accomplishments and values. What have we made and done that is worth preserving? What is best left behind?

Artwork credit: David Plowden, Great Northern Railway, “Extra 3377 East,” Near Atwater, Minnesota, 1956, printed in 2023. Inkjet print, 6 1/8 x 17 inches. Wichita Art Museum, Gift of David Plowden, 2024.6.234