She felt popular and idealized portrayals of suburbia didn't show her experience of growing up in a progressive family during the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
At 17, Plumb enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and began photographing the suburb she grew up in and other neighborhoods like it in Marin and Sonoma Counties.
She photographed Chavez's "caminata", a 1,000 mile march from the Mexican border to the Central Valley calling on farmworkers to vote in the upcoming elections in the fields.
[23] In 2021, Amanda Maddox wrote about Plumb's work in Aperture saying: "Her first monograph, Landfall, opens with a succinct statement that posits the consequential relationship between memory and fear: "I remember having insomnia for a time when I was 9 years old.
She ultimately identified the threat of climate change as the inspiration for Dark Days, a body of work made between 1984 and 1990 that, years later, was published, albeit fractionally, as Landfall.