“Best” is, of course, a rather loose term. In some cases, these are images that are emblematic or reflective of the directions my photography took over the course of the year. In other cases, they are images that simply appealed to me on some more personal level. I’m hardly an objective or unbiased observer, so forgive my skewed and imperfect list.

As with previous 10 bests (see 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010,) the order is chronological, and clicking on the image will yield the image’s Flickr page.

1.

Sunset, Astoria

The setting sun reflects in the mud flats of Astoria, as the Winter tide slowly rolls in from the mouth of the Columbia River. Much of the town’s industry once sat perched over the mud on piers like these, but the ever changing economy has removed most of the docks and warehouses that once perched upon them. In some places, old boilers still stand, remnants of forgotten canneries.

Today, Astoria’s waterfront has far more tourism along it. A large resort hotel has moved in on one pier, and restaurants overhang the water along others. The old rail line now serves as a seasonal trolley route, and a new dock serves visits from numerous cruise ships each year. Yet in spite of this, there is still a pleasant blue-collar atmosphere to the port as well as the city. Cruise passengers reportedly enjoy seeing the large piles of export logs, noting that they feel they are in a real working seaport town instead of just another tourist trap. And unlike almost all of the ocean-side cities of Oregon and Washington, Astoria has a healthy balance of basic economy that keeps it from feeling like a giant, low-rent carnival.

This photograph was made on New Year’s Day, on a brief weekend visit to my favorite coastal town.

2.

First Run

TriMet 1702, one of two RDCs refurbished for use on the Westside Express Service commuter rail line, at Wilsonville on January 24, 2011, its first day of revenue service. Portland & Western Engineer Ken Nichols leans out of the window for a classic engineer’s pose.

WES is practically in my backyard, a commuter rail service that links outlying Wilsonville with inner suburbs like Tigard and Beaverton. Unfortunately the system was troubled by new equipment that proved to be unreliable at first, and TriMet bought the RDCs — stainless teel self-propelled cars built in the 1950s — as backup power. They are nice in their own way, with a vintage feel inside, though they don’t have the heating and air conditioning power of the newer vehicles, nor their free on board WiFi Internet access.

3.

Gateway to Central Oregon

Here, just outside of Madras, the importance of railroads to small towns was driven home. 100 years to the day, the citizens of Madras celebrate, through a re-enactment, the arrival of the Oregon Trunk Railroad in their town. This event cannot be overstated. Prior to the OT, Madras was a tiny village in an area of ORegon that was largely inaccessible by any modern means, an area the size of Massachusetts. The OT brought the upper Deschuttes River country into the modern world.

After the event, in the cold snows of February, the entire town was invited to visit the depot at Metolius, also celebrating its centennial, and enjoy a community meal. Barbecue, carrot cake, corn, and memories, all served in the freight section of an old railroad station. Oregon at its finest.

4.

Kent, Oregon

Kent is one of a number of towns along US 97 in Central Oregon, north of Madras. Being located on a two lane highway, students of geography would assume that towns such as Kent would have blossomed during the 20th Century. Perhaps they did once, but if so, there is little evidence to show it now. Towns such as Shaniko, Kent, and to a lesser extent Grass Valley and Moro have slowly withered. The Columbia Southern Railroad came here first, but it was always a branch that stubbed at lonely Shaniko; a through route bypassed the branch before the Second World War, and the branch came up in segments, the last remnant gone by the 1960s.

Today, the towns live on as clusters of homes and forsaken, abandoned commercial shacks that huddle at the feet of grain elevators. This pair at Kent is particularly evocative. At the back is a large set of concrete silos, probably dating to mid-century, and now equipped with a brand new digital truck scale. In the foreground is a tall, classic, wooden structure, but built in an interesting form, with big fat boards set flat and interwoven at the corners, like brickwork. Despite its total lack of paint, it seems strong and sturdy, with no outward signs of rot, and has likely been in continuous use for a century. Both structures align to the now gone Columbia Southern, and both hang on as part of the see-sawing grain economy of the region.

Highway or no, Kent, along with the other towns of Sherman County, feels as lonely as any spot I have ever visited in the Northwest. There are mysteries here — a graveyard solely occupied by children, all dead within ten years of each other, lurks to the south of town. There is a sense of isolated, inward lives, of forgotten despair, of dreams unrealized. Perhaps above all else is the stark beauty of the land, the vistas that roll ever onward, and the feeling that the region is far bigger than the mossy, dank, dripping fir tree stereotype that, even in the cities of Western Oregon and Washington, seems so pervasive despite its inaccuracy.

5.

Tacoma’s Pantheon

2011 saw the centennial of one of the more interesting and also forgotten pieces of architecture in the Northwest, Tacoma Union Station. The building was designed by Reed & Stem, the same firm that gave the world New York’s Grand Central Terminal. For Tacoma, they designed a homage to Rome’s Pantheon, a grand dome standing about 90 feet above the lobby floor, and roofed in with copper. Although not the largest such facility in the region, it was one of the more efficiently designed, and certainly it holds a grandeur that belies its modest footprint. It is no lightweight: its walls are a good fourteen feet thick in places!

Sadly, much like rail passenger service in general, the station declined through the second half of the last century. By the 1980s it was in such bad shape that Amtrak moved out to a new, boring, modern facility further from the center of town, and the building was roped off as unsafe. Intrepid local volunteers, however, rallied support, and after much hard work, restoration of the building was funded. The structure reopened in full glory in 1992, converted to a federal court house.

Here, under the oculus of the dome, hangs another piece of artwork from Tacoma, a chandelier designed by local glass artist Dale Chihuly. Chihuly’s glass adorns many parts of the old station, but this central hanging, which resembles a collection of oddities pulled from the sea, is probably the most spectacular. Though vastly different from the mixture of neoclassical and Beaux Arts style of the structure, somehow these sleek forms seem at home here.

Sadly the conversion means the station is no longer a station, which in some ways is a shame; of all the station buildings along the I-5 corridor, none are as impressive or inspiring as this. Yet the structure survives, and its second use guarantees it a long life ahead.

My thanks to the Government Services Administration to allowing access to photograph this structure.

6.

Skylines, Portland: I

The skyline photograph is perhaps one of the oldest forms of urban photography. The form could be considered the portrait applied to the city. We all know them. Anyone who ever watches the local news can see them in various forms of quality (or lack thereof) behind the news-anchors. They get used on billboards, in tourist promotions, as web site banners.

This is not, however, the typical Portland skyline. Usually they are shot from near the foot of the Hawthorne Bridge, showing that span and the KOIN tower and the Wells Fargo tower. This view, centered on the US Bancorp Tower, is not usually chosen, but it’s hard to understand the reason why. The city here looks far more impressive, and shot as it is at an oblique angle, the towers are shown to far more advantage. The Hawthorne view is more a side view, and can sometimes seem to be two-dimentional, giving no feel of scope to the city.

There are other, better viewpoints to the city out there, I think. Some still need exploration, but I suspect a view from further north will yield a truer vista of the city as it is now, which, with the South Waterfront and the Pearl, is far, far more urban than it was just a decade ago.

The funny thing is, of course, that nearly every city can be made to look this glittering and glamorous with a skyline photo — is it really true, though? Like a hilltop vista, there is enough distance between the camera lens and the dirty, scroungy, everyday level of life that the flaws seem to disappear. In this view of Portland, you can’t see the crack addicts freezing on the streets of old town, the mentally ill homeless, the immature bar brawls, the catcalls of college frats visiting the city for a wild friday night on the town. Everything looks sweeping, gilded, luscious. It’s the visual equivalent of one of my favorite pieces of syrupy 1960s jazz, Oscar Peterson’s take on “Wandering”.

How real is real? Is the dirty, scroungy, cigarette-butt-littered street view the real Portland? Or perhaps, for all my critical comments, is there also something just as real about idealized views like these? Is there not room for a picture of aspiration? Skylines, after all, are part nostalgia — the myth of who we were or are — and part aspiration, the myth of what we wish we were and wish to be.

7.

Medford, Oregon

We’re a long way from the economy of a century ago. Small factories rarely remain in use, and warehouses hav grown larger and larger and are usually located out by the freeways and served by big rig trucks. In the centers of the small towns that once were the commercial hubs of rural Oregon, the industrial districts, like this one in Medford, are mostly quiet places. The mainline of the railroad makes a bee-line through town, and few spurs now split from it to serve the buildings backing up to the steel road.

8.

Sacramento River High Bridge, Redding

Bridges are rarely boring, but rarely are bridges in the agricultural valleys of the Pacific Slope so impressive as this one. Here at Redding, California, the Sacramento River is far below the valley floor, almost in a coulee. To cross it, the Southern Pacific Railroad constructed a massive curved steel trestle, only part of which can be seen here. The trees are bare, the Winter sun is shining, and a manifest freight charges northwards towards Oregon.

9.

For the Love of Cars / Ground Zero of Parkinglotopia, Portland, Ore.

Portland is a postcard city. Much like Vancouver, B.C., it has become an example of urban planning and design for other metropolises across North America. Photographs of our light rail trains, our streetcars, our food carts, our restaurants, our waterfront, our public spaces, our farmers markets, our condominiums, etcetera etcetera etcetera abound.

But there are two sides to every postcard, and this is one of them. Despite our alleged respect for historic structures, we have always been at the bleeding edge of poor decision making, such as tearing down bits of our urban fabric to shove in parking lots. This one was ground zero, “built” (if one can actually “build” a lot) in the 1930s at the expense of a handsome office and commercial building. It is poetic irony that the billboard painted upon the flanking wall advertises for a car dealer.

While there is a ban on new surface parking lots within the downtown, and has been for a very long time, up until the 1970s we continued this horrendously short-sighted trend of trading historic structures for surface parking. Worse, since that time, elected officials, the city government, property owners, and local developers have done absolutely nothing to repair the damage.

Today, some argue that recreations of historic structures are the only appropriate buildings to place into these slots. Others attempt to design sleek, modern structures that evoke more contemporary tastes. Often the best of the proposed replacements have their own potential ripped from them by well intentioned but horridly wrong efforts to force new structures to posses “context,” which means, in plain english, that they must sit down, shut up, and not have any role as buildings in their own right except to not distract from the remaining historic portions.

In truth, all this arguing has done only one thing: maintain the lots as is, places that encourage crime, discourage walking, and lower the value of the most precious and historic core of the city.

10.

SJN Orcas

Portland is, despite the popular notions of many, first and foremost a port. Located 100 miles upriver from the Ocean, it may seem unlikely that Portland could be more than a backwater today, a place that barely clings to its maritime roots through legacy and inertia alone. Such is not, however, the case. While almost no container traffic comes or goes from Portland, the public and private terminals of the city are one of the top export ports in the nation. More impressive yet, the amount of grain handed by Portland is greater than any other port on the continent, and the city holds the crown of third largest grain export terminal in the world.

Here, in April, is one of those grain ships: the San Juan Navigation Company Orcas, less than one year old, departing Portland Harbor bound for Asia, riding low in the river from a hold full of Northwest wheat. Downtown hovers on the horizon, and in the foreground, the river bears the shadow of the high Gothic St. Johns Bridge, probably the most beautiful suspension span in the world.

Looking at the trends, if any, a few emerge. First is more color: last year was all black-and-white, and this year it’s about 50/50. Indeed, one of the images — number 9 — is color print film, Kodak Ektar 100, part of a test run of this film. While I still find black-and-white a strong part of my work, for the first time in recent memory I’m ending the year still having film in the fridge. I think that my long absence from meaningful quantities of color work has given me a more discerning eye for it. I feel more comfortable with it, and I’ve gotten well past that trap of viewing color itself as a substitute for other, more important things, like composition and purpose.

It may or may not be apparent in the images, but this was also a year of greater intent in each image.
About half the shots here were pre-planned or re-shot as refinements of earlier ideas. There were far fewer cohesive projects, and far more site visits for writing and journalism projects. Lastly, there was more travel: less than half of the images here are from the Portland metropolitan region.

As usual, there are still a few rolls from 2011 undeveloped as I write this, and there are further a number of developed images that are as yet unscanned and uncorrected. Looking forward, I expect a return to more planned projects, but I also expect less photography in general, as the year is already filling with many writing projects.

And next, 2012.

One of the essential tensions of photography is that between a photographer’s style and the substance of his or her photographs.

I spend a considerable amount of time looking at photography on sites such as Flickr. Of those that catch my eye, many of them are stunning. Shimmering liquid colors, stunning effects, dramatic angles. Sometimes I think that everyone is shooting stills on the set of Kings of Convenience music video.

Perhaps I am imagining things, but it seems these honeyed images are typical of the direction of contemporary photography, an effect of the digital age. It is not, I think, that this is the only kind of photography that digital cameras lead to, but rather I think it is the thumbnail effect. Technicolor dreams attract your attention at 100×125 pixels, and look great on a computer screen with its typically dull whites and grays. Rich saturation, “HDR,” post-processed additions and deletions; it’s all eye candy in all of its intoxicating glory.

Digital photographers didn’t invent this sort of thing of course, they’re merely following a long trend of romanticism and fantasy. One of photography’s greatest, Minor White, made a series of photographs of seascapes. So did Robert Adams, which seems out of character given his far more rationalist visual sensibility.

I don’t dislike these images (or images like them), but I confess I don’t value them much.

A photographer is responsible for whatever goes into the frame of his or her image. Intention — the Big Why — is the first and most important thing any photographer can and should ask of themselves. When I look at pretty, windswept images of the sea by White or Adams — just as when I look at the Technicolor fantasies of Flickr — I am moved… for a moment. Once the moment passes, the value of the image fades.

For all the technical wizardry we as photographers are capable of, for all the gosh-and-golly eye candy we can produce, for all the golden moments on the shoreline, it must never be forgotten that photography is first and foremost a medium of making records. What we photograph matters as much as — no! More than! — how we photograph it. As beautiful as a day’s end against the Pacific can be, what are you, as a photographer, contributing to the world by making photographs of it?

I’ve always felt that time and loss are integral to community. It is the passage of time and the changes — losses — that time brings that makes a sense of place more palpable. To be in a place one has never been before carries a kind of excitement and wonder, but to return to a place — especially after the passage of time — is an entirely different sort of sensation. The tart edge of freshness is worn away, and deeper, nuanced subtleties become more visible. Partly this is because of the thoughts, feelings, and ripening of memories that takes place between the first visit and the next, but much of it, too, is created through the changes wrought by time.

When I think of time, change, and photography, there’s one artist who comes to mind above all else: David Plowden. I recently wrote about Plowden’s railroad photography for the Railfan and Railroad “Extra Board.” Plowden is widely known for his being “one step ahead of the wrecking ball” as he photographs the fading remnants of Industrial Age America. The latest installment of this visual obsession is the book Requiem for Steam, which is now available in local bookstores.

Recently, Plowden went on Iowa Public Radio to talk about steam locomotives, photography, and this latest book. The interview is 49 minutes long, but well worth making time to listen to. It made for a good start to this Monday with my morning tea. Plowden has a mesmerizing voice and a lively edge to his words; you can tell them man is truly passionate about what he photographs.

Plowden had no intention of being a photographer: he wanted to be “a railroad man.” When he went to university, he studied economics with the hope of becoming a railroad executive. “This was a terrible mistake,” he notes, “it really wasn’t the business end of railroading that interested me, it was the romance.” This was, in some ways, the “never-meet-your-heros” moment for Plowden, and his career in the railroad industry was short. Working for the Great Northern in Willmar, Minnesota, he ended up being promoted away from the locomotives and into the offices; shortly afterwards he quit.

This decision has a lot of resonance with me. I’ve had my Willmar moment as well, and learned very rapidly that I had little interest in the sterile, insular, acerbic environment that is the modern railroad. (That Plowden emerged with his longing for the romance of railroading intact is a small miracle.) Photographers, I think, have a hard time relating to the world as a functioning part of it. We feel more comfortable behind the camera, observing, recording, judging, praising, condemning, hoping. Or am I alone in feeling that way?

I could go on relating Plowden’s early photographic career chasing the last pulse-beats of the steam railroad, or his self-described “brazenness” that made it possible, but I’d be ruining the interview for you. Listen to it, even if you aren’t interested in steam locomotives. Learn from it how this photographer thinks about the images he makes, and how to approach subjects, and having purpose in ones photography.

And for those who can swing a bit of travel this week, Plowden will be in Sacramento for two events, the first a fundraiser for the Center for Railroad Photography and Art on Thursday night, and the second being a book-signing event on Saturday. Both will be at the California State Railroad Museum. I’ll be attending both events, and I encourage anyone else who can to do the same.

Zeb has been making images of the bridges of Portland for some time now, mostly the Fremont and St. Johns. In recent months, however, Zeb began to make a series that was meant to capture the essence of all of Portland’s varied bridges. Anyone who knows much about my photographic tastes knows that bridges are a strong draw for me as well, so it should be no surprise that I looked forward to each new image as Zeb revealed them on his Flicker stream. Check them out yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree that they’re great stuff.

Now, Zeb is trying to take this series to the next step, and share it with the world beyond Flicker with an exhibit and a book. Unfortunately, exhibits are not cheap, especially once you add up the costs of all the matts, frames, and such.

In short, Zeb needs your help. Zeb is raising money for this exhibit on Kickstarter, a site for creative fundraising.

The premise of Kickstarter is simple: within a given time frame, people can pledge to support a specific project proposal such as Zeb’s. If the total is reached before the deadline, then your pledge is paid out, and the project moves forward. If the total isn’t reached by the deadline, nobody pays anything. Payments are all handled through Amazon, a solid proven e-commerce provider.

By supporting Zeb’s project, you’ll help be part of seeing his work in an exhibit sometime this year. If altruism isn’t enough alone, Zeb’s offering a range of thank-you gifts, from postcards and postcard sets to prints to a book of images from the series.

For full disclosure, I have nothing vested here other than seeing some cool photos get some good exposure. I only really know Zeb through his work on Flickr and the fact that he’s usually the guy behind the counter at Blue Moon Camera when I pick up or drop off film.

So if you like Zeb’s bridge images, consider going over and making a pledge to support his project. The pledge period ends July 28th and any donation, no matter how small, will help.

And to Zeb, best of luck, and I look forward to my set of thank-you postcards.

Fall and Winter can be a dual-edged sword for photographers.

On the down side, colors often become muted, and days are shorter thus cutting down how long you can remain outside shooting without the complication of tripods and time exposures or the use of high ISO settings / films.

On the other hand, the light is often quite low, providing striking side lighting on objects normally far less illuminated during Summer. And those same muted colors can be an asset, reducing the palette and emphasizing form and composition over richness.

These cooler months and shorter days can also provide interesting atmospheric conditions, like the slight mist seen here veiling Portland’s Steel Bridge on a cold December day.

David Plowden: Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography
By David Plowden, forward by Richard Snow, introduction by Steve Edwards. W. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 11.3 x 12.5 in; hardbound; 340 pages, 237 b/w photos; $100.00

A trip to the photography section of a well-stocked bookstore will yield shelves full of photographer’s monographs. Countless spines arrest the eyes, each one vying to be the stylish work that convinces you that this photographer is the American Master.

And then there is David Plowden.

Plowden is one of the few living links between today and the greats of documentarian photography, the geniuses of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others who participated in the Farm Services Administration’s photography project during the Great Depression. Their work, seminal to the documentary style, was paradoxically emotive, evoking a minimalistic visual poetry. Plowden — who struck up a friendship with Evans in the late ’50s — built upon this tradition, mixing a lyric style of photography with a documentary sensibility.

Over the course of his career, Plowden has published numerous books, almost always organized along topical lines: great lakes steam boats, great bridges of North America, vanishing small towns. He also has a fascination for railroads, the first love on which he lavished his camera — indeed his first published photo was in TRAINS Magazine in 1954. This love expanded to encompass all manner of industrial subjects, from steamships and tugboats to steel mills and grain elevators. Now 76 years old, Plowden is at the end of his career, and it seems natural that he would publish a retrospective volume of his photography. Vanishing Point is that work.

The book opens — after two images and a table of contents– with a forward by Richard Snow, formerly the editor of American Heritage. Here Snow ably pens a brief discussion of Plowden’s career. The brush strokes are light, and those familiar with Plowden’s work might criticize it as being repetitive or unnecessary, but it provides a valuable taste of the text and photos to follow, almost as if it were a kind of abstract of the remaining book. A gentle start: so far, so good.

All this changes changes with the turn of the page and a remarkable 14-page introductory essay by Steve Edwards. Edwards brings his journalist sensibilities to the fore as he spins the story of the life and career of David Plowden. In so many ways, the story the journalist tells seems almost cinematic: a troubled childhood in New England, a youth amongst railroad men, a struggle to study a discipline he hated (economics) at Yale in hopes of making himself a better railroad employee following graduation. The reader is treated to the full transit of the photographer’s disillusionment with the railroad world and with more common paths of life that would eventually bring him to photography. And here he works for Winston Link, studies under Minor White, and becomes fast friends with Walker Evans.

Edward’s portrait is deftly penned with a light touch and a sensitivity to emotions and motives that makes the reader feel they can get inside — if only for a brief moment — the heart and mind of the photographer. He is sympathetic, but candid too; Plowden’s single-minded devotion to his art often came at the expense of a relationship with his children and eventually cost him his first marriage. The event is part of a repeating pattern of loss that seems endemic to Plowden’s drive. Edwards relates a point in 1960, after Plowden had left the studio of Minor White, feeling he had made a great mistake to study photography. The scene is rural Maine, and the photographer is standing the the cab of a steam locomotive on the very last steam-powered run on the line.

“‘While that engine died, I sat in the cab in Brownsville Junction and watched the gauge drop to zero,’ [Plowden] says. The loss was palpable; the very thing that had provided so much joy and escape during his troubled childhood had vanished.”

In the space of a few short sentences, Edwards gets to the burning core of Plowden’s modus operandi.

After this come the photographs themselves. Plowden was once scoffed at for being a “topical” photographer; here he wears this on his sleeve, dividing the book into seven thematic chapters of plates. Each is designated by only a roman numeral, with no title, no explanatory text, no attempt at interpretation. It is only the chapter divider, the plates, and in tiny text at the bottom, a plate number and very cursory caption.

Although railroads were Plowden’s first love, they are not the focus of the work, and indeed the images of railroads he presents here are not the strongest images in the book. The most amusing thing about these images is the first plate, a photo of a Great Northern steam-powered freight near Wilmar, Minnesota: it violates nearly every rule of railroad photography convention, with no light on the nose of the locomotive, a broad foreground space of snow and haphazard weeds, and a line of poles and wires directly in front of the engine!

In addition to the train-centric images are more domestic moments, with the engines getting washed, maintained, and fueled by engine terminal crews. These images display a cinematic quality that is similar to Link, and indeed many of the plates date from 1959-1960, around the time of Plowden’s association with that famous photographic dramatist. There is, however, one key element that is notably different; while Link resorted to everything short of building a personal hydrogen-powered sun to light his subjects with Hitchcockian precision, Plowden has worked only with available light. The result? His images seem fresher and more natural than Link’s, as if the events in them had taken place but a few days ago, rather than decades hence.

Far more stunning than the railroad plates are the nautical images, such as plate 31, “Tugboat Julia C. Moran Undocking Liner, Hudson River, New York City (1975)”. We are on the forward deck of a Hudson tug, barely seeing more than a few inches of the con. Out forward is a single man — one of the few humans that Plowden has included in his Hopperesque de-peopled world — unwrapping one of the ropes that holds the liner to the tug. And behind hims soars the great silver rivet-speckled bow of the hull of an ocean liner, so massive that her decks and superstructure are lost somewhere in an Olympian height beyond the view of the camera.

Bridges are, of course, one of David Plowden’s greatest loves, and with boyish glee he gives us great hulking massive flying piles of steel. My favorite is probably one of the closest to me, an image of Newport, Oregon’s Yaquina Bay Bridge shown in plate 61. The photo looks down the empty length of the span, and flanked between two gothic concrete spires curves the steel arch of the main bridge. The top nearly disappears into coastal fog, and the far end is barely even there at all. Beyond, there is no world, no ocean, no hills.

Next comes a chapter on industrial subjects, lead by a large set of photographs of the steel making process. Giant metal buckets, glowing molten steel, flashing dancing sparks. After a tour of this mechanical Hades, Plowden takes us on a journey through a litany of “back end” jobs, a hidden world of industry and commerce that few get to see. We see the great ore docks. We meet the solitary men who work in the bellies of steamships. We walk among lunar piles of coal and of iron ore. We get lost amongst the clinical inhumanity of a nuclear power plant.

The fifth chapter could be best described as wastelands. The images here are perhaps the most complex and most postmodern of the book. This America is one that is decaying, where every house hasn’t been painted since FDR was president and each car looks like only Richard Roundtree would want to drive it, if it were still 1975 anyway. The bleakness, the desolation, the emptiness here is almost disturbing. Every now and then, I catch a sensation that reminds me of the empty highway-spaces of Jeff Brouws. There is a vague notion of social commentary emerging here, especially in the few plates here that show people; what is the future of the freckle-faced boy from rural West Virginia in plate 132? What kind of life awaits the girl staring out the window in plate 136? The state of paint and repair of her Pennsylvania home doesn’t give much hope of stewardship for the world she is about to inherit. And in plate 143, shot in 1967, even the iconic form of the Statue of Liberty is framed by power poles and trash.

Love re-enters the picture in chapter six. Here is rural America, and rural Americana: the small town main street, the general store, the hardware store. This is the world that is fast fleeting, a victim of a rural populace mystified at the decline of tradition and Main Street while they push their shopping carts down the aisles of Wal-Mart. The shop-keepers — when they appear at all — are old, their faces as cracked as the paint of their wooden floorboards. And now and then we get children, too, and an old couple in Iowa who keep a clapboard house with Swiss net curtains, and we get the silence of over-furnished empty front parlors from houses that were built when people knew what the heck the word “parlor” even meant.

Storm clouds on the plains of New Mexico opens up the seventh and final chapter of Vanishing Point. It is the same image that is used on the dust jacket, a powerful, sweeping metaphor for the elegy that is the remainder of the book. From here out, there will be no more people, not a single solitary one. Indeed the only identifiable living creature is a single horse — pale like that ridden by Death in the Four Horseman of the Book of Revelations. It stares out at us kindly from a single small square window in the side of a barn in plate 221. We are alone now, in the plains, navigating by grain elevators. We walk freely amongst barns and inside of feed mills. It seems that dust still hangs in the air, as if someone was just here, just working, but where have they gone? There is a profound solemnity, as if in church, and each successive image shows us less and tells us more.

The final image — plate 235 — returns us back to where we and Plowden both began. It is a railroad track. Frost once wrote of two roads that diverged in a wood, one well taken, and one rarely so. Plowden, like the poet, took the one “less travelled by”. Here, though, we see the mainline — the path well worn — and the diverging route merging towards a switch that unites them. Are we looking backwards from the diverging route of Plowden’s life, to see what has gone now collectively behind us? Or are we looking ahead, and seeing that even the route less taken eventually winds to the same common end? Take care and note: there are no buildings. There are no people. There is not even a train. There is only a track that crests over a small rise and disappears, and beyond that, empty hills bearing no promises. It is an evocative image on which to end the collection of photographic plates, especially considering that the book is meant as a retrospective of an entire career.

The closing text of the work is from Plowden himself, and his voice crackles with energy. Here he is full of humor and wit, buoyant in a way that is natural to those who have such a keen sense of loss and of the fleeting nature of time. Here we are imbued in a world of technical geekdom but told in such a loving fashion that, like the sometimes nonsensical phrasing of a T.S. Elliot poem, the reader is enthralled. He tells a hilarious narrative of his bad luck in camera choices, contraptions that seemed bent on being too bulky, too complicated, or too delicate to stand up to the demands he would place on them. The notes read like a letter from a favorite grandfather that you rarely see. It is perhaps the most valuable text in the book, and as precious as any of the photographic plates bound within the book’s pages.

This is a heavy book, weighing in at over five pounds. The binding is stout but never gets in the way of viewing the photographic plates, even in the middle of this thick volume. The paper is strong and bright and feels good under the hand. Reproduction on the photos is outstanding with fine tonal range. The design work on the book tends towards minimalist, with subtle tones, simple font choices, and bold charcoal-hued chapter dividers bearing stark roman numerals and nothing more. All the plates are produced in a nearly full-page format, with white margins neither distractingly thin nor drastically wide. Image grouping is carefully planned; where images face each other across pages (which is most of the time), the images act as a kind of diptych, reflecting some common graphic value or subject theme, while images that are strongest on their own are displayed solitary against a blank page. The book looks and feels like every penny of its $100 price.

Vanishing Point is a monumental volume befitting the lifetime’s work of one of America’s greatest photographers. There is no question that this is one of the finest books I have had the pleasure of adding to my collection in years. It is a shame that some in the world of high art have derided Plowden as a “topical” artist. For every avant-guard photographer the art schools crank out, few will ever achieve the richness and depth of the American soul that David Plowden has. His work stands alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the literature of Mark Twain as essential to understanding the uniqueness of American culture. With an outstanding introduction, a collection of stunning plates, and a precious gem of an afterward from Plowden himself, Vanishing Point proves itself the definitive work of Plowden’s life. No serious photographer of American culture should be without it. Photography books this fine are rarely printed en-masse; when this book finally sells out, it will likely begin to appreciate in price steadily. Buy it while it’s new, before you have to pay twice as much for a used copy.

Vanishing Point is available from Amazon or Powell’s.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead