From small towns and cityscapes to railroads and bridges, David Plowden has devoted his career to memorializing the vestiges of America's industrial and rural past. In his photographs and writings, he explores the beauty, power, blight, and significance of these once commonplace icons and vistas - and captures the visual texture of a bygone America on the verge of vanishing.

His work is clear-eyed, rigorous, and ultimately ambivalent rather than nostalgic; steel mills, for instance, are "at once magnificent and apocalyptic - a definitive expression of mankind's inherently productive and creative, as well as destructive, nature." This book, published in conjunction with a series of retrospective exhibitions across America, looks back over Plowden's entire career and presents the very best of his work.