About the Author

Peter Feldstein is an artist working at the intersection of photography, drawing, printmaking, and digital imaging. Feldstein's work has been shown in galleries across the country, at eh Des Moines Art Center and has been included in group exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography, Walker Art Center, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He has received an NEA Individual Artist's Grant and two Polaroid Collection Grants. For more than three decades, Feldstein taught photography and digital imaging at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History.

Stephen G. Bloom is the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harvest Books). He is also the author of a collection of non-fiction stories, Inside the Writer's Mind (Wiley-Blackwell), and Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls (St. Martin's Press). Since 1993, Bloom has taught at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in narrative writing.

Reviews

In this cleverly designed and artfully illustrated publication, artist Feldstein and Bloom (journalism & mass communication, Univ. of Iowa; Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America) document inhabitants of the small town of Oxford, IA, with more than 300 black-and-white photographic portraits and first-person narratives. Feldstein, who was living in Oxford in 1984, offered to photograph for free all the town's residents; 20 years later, he photographed as many of his previous subjects as he could locate, and Bloom interviewed 100 of the residents. Masterfully and collaboratively conceived, this book consists of demographic, historical, and visual data about Oxford and snapshots of the town's inhabitants in 1984 juxtaposed to those taken in present times, many of which are offset by their stories. Of significance to humanities scholars and social scientists as well as to general readers who may relate to its subjects, this work provides a good glimpse of small-town America but is unlikely to be the most authoritative vision. Accompanying a traveling exhibition to China and Italy, this publication is strongly recommended for many undergraduate academic, large public, and local library collections, particularly those encompassing documentary photography and narrative journalism.--Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.