LAMAMIMET

David Plowden was born on October 9, 1932, in Boston and grew up mainly in New York City before spending summers on his family’s farm in Putney, Vermont. He attended the Putney School, graduating in 1951, and earned a degree from Yale College in 1955. After a stint with the Great Northern Railway in 1959, Plowden studied under Minor White and Nathan Lyons and worked as an assistant to O. Winston Link and George Meluso. He became known for stark, detailed documentary photographs of steam locomotives, steel mills, small‑town main streets, and the American countryside, producing twenty books and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. He taught at institutions such as the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, the University of Iowa, the University of Baltimore, and Grand Valley State University. Plowden’s work entered the permanent collections of major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian, and he mounted numerous exhibitions, notably at the Chicago Historical Society, the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Grohmann Museum, and the Sioux City Art Center, which opened his Iowa exhibit on the day of his death. He died on May 4, 2026, at the age of 93.