This is 50 years of dedicated, passionate black and white film photography documenting an America now almost totally gone. A landmark book!

"My first photograph was of a train. I was eleven in the summer of 1943 when Boston and Maine's Number 74 came steaming around the curve into the depot at Putney, Vermont. I used my mother's little red box Brownie camera to make the picture. The following Christmas she gave me a Brownie Reflex, which had a square format and a ground glass. I am sure that little gem of a camera, in which one composed the image by looking into its ground glass, has a great deal to do with why I have been so at home using the Rollieflex and the Hasselblad, both of which have a ground glass. . . Since 1968 I have used Hasselblads exclusively for all my work. I am still convinced that my early experience with the Brownie Reflex is the reason I am completely at home with the square."
from David Plowden: Vanishing Point, Fifty Years of Photography,
New York, W..W. Norton and Company. n.d.

This $100 book is available from Amazon for $67.50. The photographs are impeccable, the reproductions excellent, and the introduction by the photographer a compact marvel of honest truth-telling about a life well-lived. If you don't want to buy it, try to get your library to get one, so you can see it! ( )