“The Prairies and Plains,” Walt Whitman wrote, “while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest.” David Foster Wallace loved the way that, along midwestern highways, “the corn starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem.” Even Barack Obama has praised “the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois.”
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Plowden grew up in New York City, but found it noisy and crowded: “You couldn’t see the sky.” So after putting in time at various east-coast institutions—boarding school, Yale—he went to work for Great Northern Railroad. In Minnesota, Plowden began studying the region’s rural topography. “I really fell in love with it,” he says. “When I quit the railroad, I started trying to think of a way to get back.”
Back in 1964, though, he was still a young photographer on assignment for American Heritage. The magazine wanted him to retrace the route of Lincoln’s funeral train, and Plowden was trying to keep to its original schedule. Outside of Funk’s Grove, Illinois, he found himself photographing a hazy sunrise. “That is when I suddenly discovered the flatland,” he remembers, “how difficult it was to photograph, but also how beautiful it was.” The picture from Funk’s Grove is the first one in Heartland.
Yet one measure of the power of Plowden’s work is in its ability to both celebrate and condemn. There’s a photograph of McLean County, Illinois—a later one, from 2008. The sky is crystalline, the horizon straight. In the middle of it sits an abandoned farmhouse, with natural light filtering through what used to be its windows. Here is a picture that captures how the heartland can be hard and lonely—the kind of place that brings out the best in some people, but not in others.
By David Plowden (W.W. Norton & Company).Reading Sat 10/19, 4:30 PM Book Stall at Chestnut Court811 ElmWinnetkathebookstall.com free
