A Handful of Dust Disappearing America

Since making his earliest documentary photographs in the 1950s, David Plowden has honoured those proud structures and places that America has discarded - from brawny commercial and industrial centres to small towns and farms. But the scene has changed much in the last five decades. What’s left of the honesty of small communities and the working of the land is all but gone, dealt a deathblow by outsourcing, conglomerisation and the drive to buy cheap at any cost. The America of these photographs is a bittersweet reminder of things once cherished and a life no longer possible. Deserted Main Streets and crumbling facades stare at us blindly. Abandoned houses and buildings reach back to the ground. A sad symphony, A Handful of Dust is an incomparably and irresistibly beautiful elegy for a changing landscape by a master photographer.