Indian Reservation, Cache Creek, British Columbia, 1968
Gelatin silver print
10 ¼ × 7 ¾ inches
Signed, titled, and dated in pencil on verso
June 29, 2026
The visual rhyme between the clapboard church and the overturned ice box suggests that they could be relatives—if the weatherbeaten but regal church is the patriarch, the abandoned icebox could be the indecorous relative who spills a bit too much of the family tea.
David Plowden descended from the Walker Evans school of photography, but while Evans focused on portraits of regional and vernacular architecture, Plowden had an almost boyish interest in railroads, bridges, and the other brawny infrastructure that stitched together the North American continent. Plowden didn’t set out to document the decline of a certain working class way of American life, but the times he lived in meant that he recorded the twilight era when many of the edifices of American settlement were shadows of their former glory. His photograph here of a desolate and wind swept First Nations reservation in British Columbia delves deeper into the realities that lay behind the colonialist myths of North America.
Dedicated to the Memory of David Plowden
October 9, 1932–May 4, 2026
