NOVEMBER 5, 2008
Our town
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 NONFICTION |
Welcome to post-election America!
Main Street played an important part in this year’s campaign. But Main Street, USA, is not the same as America’s actual Main Streets — which have more texture and more life to them than anything a campaign ad could capture. Take, for instance, the mean streets of Oxford, Iowa.
Twenty-four years ago, Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every one of Oxford’s 676 residents. In 2005, he did it again, and asked Stephen G. Bloom along to record their life stories. They’ve come away with an extraordinary book, The Oxford Project, which is equal parts history lesson, art exhibit, and social experiment: See freckled boys become soft-bellied fathers, and young women turn into matrons. Watch lives come together and fall apart (there are marriages, births, divorces, and deaths). The accompanying text describes dreams deferred — and realized — but it’s the stark, black-and-white images that will stay with you.
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The Oxford Project (Welcome Books; hardcover; 264 pages)
the website for The Oxford Project
