Updated Info on The Oxford Project
In the storytelling tradition of Studs Terkel and the photographic spirit of Mike Disfarmer, The Oxford Project tells the extraordinary true tale of a seemingly ordinary Midwestern town through the pictures and words of its residents.
The exhibition is called “The Oxford Project.”
Oxford is quintessential flyover, small-town America, a town of 700 people.
Then, two decades later, Feldstein got to talking with his University of Iowa buddy, journalism professor Stephen G. Bloom, and “The Oxford Project” was reborn.
And, all photographer Peter Feldstein did was offer to take free pictures.
He retired from the university last year after three decades as a professor of photography and digital imagery.
The Project began almost twenty-five years ago, when Peter Feldstein undertook the remarkable task of photographing nearly every resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa pop.
The town is at the bottom of two small hills in the rolling plains of Eastern Iowa, 100 miles east of Des Moines.
Over the last few months, Feldstein has re-shot many of the portraits, Bloom has interviewed dozens of the subjects about their lives, and together they’ve turned the town’s stories into art.
This powerful confessional book draws its strength from the truth that so-called ordinary people, not those with bold-faced names, are actually the heroes of our American drama.”
His book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America focused on the not-so-pleasant changes occurring in the tiny farm-town of Postville, Iowa, after Hasidic Jews took over a defunct meant processing plant in town.
Two decades later Feldstein did it again, re-photographing as many of the original residents as he could locate.
Considered side-by-side, these portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, and laugh lines.
He moved to Oxford in 1978 and decided to take a picture of everyone in town.
This intricate web of human connections among neighbors, friends, and family, is the mainstay of small-town American life—unforgettably captured here in Feldstein’s candid black-and-white photography and Bloom’s rhythmic storytelling.
In those stark, full-body images Feldstein managed to capture not only the visage of rural America, but a sense of its underlying spirit.
Much of the nation has never heard or really cared about Oxford, Iowa that is until now.
Bloom’s careful account of the town’s identity crisis garnered him “Best Book of the Year” honors from The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Rocky Mountain News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2000.
Equally fascinating are those for whom time has stood still; whose original and present day portraits appear eerily identical.
Oxford is 16 miles from Iowa City and the University of Iowa, but it may as well be 16,000.
