The American Barn
For once, an album of Plowden's superb black-and-white photographs is classified as an art book rather than, because he photographs functional buildings and machines, a technology tome. And perhaps no other Plowden book is as obviously artistic as this display of dairy barns in the northeastern U.S and southeast Canada. The vast planes of barn walls, doors, and roofs, usually set upon vast planes of prairie and against vast planes of sky, inevitably suggest, to art cognoscenti, the formal concerns of cubism and its American realist cognate, precisionism, especially since the latter was developed by paintersandphotographers. Yes, these pictures look like Charles Sheeler's paintings and photos, but it is doubtful that Plowden had those precedents in mind. His lovely prefatory memoir never mentions other art, and in the acknowledgments, he calls the book "more of a poem . . . an elegy." That is, it fits with the rest of his work, which affectionately, respectfully records a world of work that is vanishing from North America.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved