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Remembering David Plowden
14 June 2026
David Plowden, who made "elegant photographs" of machinery, died early last month after a heart attack. He was 93.
Plowden was born in Boston, the older of two, to a father who was a British-born actor and set designer and a mother who was an accomplished pianist.
The family moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when he was six. He would stare out the window, fascinated by the steamships and tugboats navigating the East River.
The family summered on their farm in Putney, Vt. David eventually attended the Putney School, a private high school there, learning darkroom and other photography skills before graduating in 1951.
He enrolled at Yale, earning a bachelor's degree in economics in 1955. At Yale, he befriended the eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough, who referred to his work as "elegant photographs."
Economics and a business career did not appeal to him. Instead, he decided to make a career of photography, taking classes with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Returning to New York City, he met Walker Evans, then a staff photographer and photo editor at Fortune magazine, and would visit him at the Time & Life Building.
In 1978, he began teaching at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he moved with his family.
All the while, he continued to hone his craft on the things that he had always found fascinating.
In the 1960s, he began focusing the lens of his Hasselblad, which mounted on a tripod rather than hand-held, at ancient steel mills, lumbering Great Lakes cargo ships and an assortment of old industrial relics.
"I love photographing gears," he once confessed. "I love photographing machinery that took people to run. There's nothing more beautiful than a shovel. Did you ever watch anybody shovel coal in a locomotive or shoveling wheat? It seems almost like a ballet."
Among his publications are Tugboat (1976), Steel (1981) and Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie (2013).
Plowden's work has appeared in The New York Times, American Heritage and other publications. It is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and other institutions.
His first marriage, to Pleasance Coggeshall, ended in divorce in 1976. He married Sandra Schoellkopf in 1977. In addition to her, he is survived by their two children, Philip and Karen Plowden, two sons from his first marriage, John and Daniel, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.