Ocean side, sound side - Ocracoke Island, North Carolina 

Requiem for Steam

David Plowden's latest book, Requiem for Steam was released this week.

If you don't know Plowden's work, you should. He has spend decades photographing the vanishing remnants of America's great mechanical age with a poet's eye. Things that were a familiar part of the landscape in the first half of the twentieth Century are now gone, or changed beyond recognition. Requiem for Steam is part celebration of, part elegy for the steam locomotive, and a time in railroad history that came to an end in 1960.

The book opens with a long essay by Plowden, telling the story of long distances, run-down hotels in isolated railroad towns, days and nights haunting the engine houses and depots and rail yards photographing the end of an era. What we sense in the photographs is confirmed by his words: Plowden loved his subject, and was committed to it. As he describes his last ride in the cab of a steam locomotive, the sense of loss is palpable.

My favorite picture in the book is not of a locomotive or a long ago demolished station. It is a portrait of Ray H. Birkhead, an agent for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. He has taken his glasses off and is looking directly into the camera. The wall behind him is stained, and a bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling. The picture was taken on his last day on the job before retiring. I love this picture because ultimately, this story is not about iron, but about the flesh and blood that built and maintained, operated and loved the "iron horses" that would soon be cut up and sent to the scrap yard.

Mr Birkhead retired from the railroad after 60 years of service, in the final days of steam.

David Plowden, Requiem for Steam. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. 2010