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The Oxford Project

Stephen G. Bloom

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every single resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa (pop. 676). He converted an abandoned storefront on Main Street into a makeshift studio and posted fliers inviting people to stop by. At first they trickled in slowly, but in the end, nearly all of Oxford stood before Feldstein's lens. Twenty years later, Feldstein decided to do it again. Only this time he invited writer Stephen G. Bloom to join him, and together they went in search of the same Oxford residents Feldstein had originally shot two decades earlier. Some had moved. Most had stayed. Others had passed away. All were marked by the passage of time.

In a place like Oxford, not only does everyone know everyone else, but also everyone else's brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, lovers, secrets, failures, dreams, and favorite pot luck recipes. This intricate web of human connections between neighbors friends, and family, is the mainstay of small town American life, a disappearing culture that is unforgettably captured in Feldstein's candid black-and-white portraiture and Bloom's astonishing rural storytelling.

Meet the town auctioneer who fell in love with his wife in high school while ice-skating together on local ponds; his wife who recalls the dress she wore as his prom date over fifty years ago; a retired buck skinner who started a gospel church and awaits the rapture in 2028; the donut baker at the Depot who went from having to be weighed on a livestock scale to losing over 150 pounds with the support of all of Oxford; a twenty-one-year-old man photographed in 1984 as an infant in his father's arms, who has now survived both of his parents due to tragedy and illness.

Considered side-by-side, the portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, and bowed backs. Babies and children have instantly sprouted into young nurses, truck drivers, teachers, and rodeo riders, become Buddhists, racists, democrats, and drug addicts. The courses of lives have been irrevocably altered by deaths, births, marriages, and divorces. Some have lost God--others have found Him. But there are also those for whom it appears time has almost stood still. Kevin Somerville looks eerily identical in his 1984 and 2004 portraits, right down to his worn overalls, shaggy mane, and pale sunglasses. Only the graying of his lumberjack beard gives away the years that have passed.

Face after face, story after story, what quietly emerges is a living composite of a quintessential Midwestern community, told through the words and images of its residents--then and now. In a town where newcomers are recognized by the sound of an
unfamiliar engine idle, The Oxford Project invites you to discover the unexpected details, the heartbreak, and the reality of lives lived on the fringe of our urban culture.

American Farmer: The Heart of Our Country

Katrina Fried

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When photographer Paul Mobley set out to capture the soul of America's farming communities, he discovered a culture defined by tradition, integrity, and hard work, and comprised of the most authentic and generous individuals he's ever encountered. Traveling across the country from Tennessee to Montana, Mobley and his camera were welcomed into the homes of over one hundred farming families, who graciously shared their personal histories along with the fruits of their labor. To spend time with them was to turn back the clock--to an era when there were no locks on doors, no urban sprawl, and no virtue more prized than common decency. Children still move across the street and not across the state when they grow up, and parents move back in with their children whern they grow old. Story after story, visit after visit, Mobley slowly came to know the independent farmer's spirit both from behind the lens and over the dinner table.

The result is a stunning series of portraits and direct quotes that collectively chronicle the life of the American farmer. Each image offers an unvarnished and intimate look inside the hardships and joys of a quickly disappearing lifestyle--one that once defined our national identity and now struggles just to keep a foothold. And even as encroaching cities threaten their livelihoods, these men and women continue to find sustenance in the same basic human values they were raised with. American Farmer is an inspirational reminder of what it means to live with simplicity and contentment, in a world that is driven by excess. This vivid portfolio is accompanied by anecdotes and memories in the farmer's own words that are both a testament to their enduring hospitatlity and a moving glimpse into their daily routines and family histories. But what you will read first, and foremost, are their faces. From Bruce Crump, a citrus farmer in Florida; to Patsy Fribley, a stockyard dealer from Montana; to Thurston Wilber, a Maine lobsterman, Mobley's intense and beautiful portraits capture the furrows of fields lining their brows, the crevices of drought creasing the corners of their mouths, and the grains of truth in their squinted eyes.

35 states included: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming

The Americans

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Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because Frank himself was on the road, he was particularly attuned to Americans' love for cars. Funeral-goers lean against a shiny sedan, lovers kiss on a beach blanket in front of their parked car, young boys perch in the back seat at a drive-in movie. A sports car under a drop cloth is framed by two California palm trees; on the next page, a blanket is draped over a car accident victim's body in Arizona.

Robert Frank's Americans reappear 40 years after they were initially published in this exquisite volume by Scalo. Each photograph (there are more than 80 of them) stands alone on a page, while the caption information is included at the back of the book, allowing viewers an unfettered look at the images. Jack Kerouac's original introduction, commissioned when the photographer showed the writer his work while sitting on a sidewalk one night outside of a party, provides the only accompanying text. Kerouac's words add narrative dimension to Frank's imagery while in turn the photographs themselves perfectly illustrate the writer's own work.

One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey (Annivers

Sam Keith, Richard Proenneke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

One Man's Wilderness 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is written "by Sam Keith from the journals and photographs of Richard Proenneke" - so although I read it and visualized the events within as if it had all been written by Richard Proenneke, it wasn't. Sam Keith tells us in the preface: "Using Dick Proenneke's rough journals as a guide, and knowing him as well as I did, I have tried to get into his mind and reveal the "flavor" of the man. This is my tribute to him, a celebration of his being in tune with his surroundings and what he did alone with simple tools and ingenuity in carving his masterpiece out of the beyond."

I've seen the PBS presentation of "Alone in the Wilderness", which uses selections from the text of this book along with movie footage of Proenneke building his cabin and living there. Those selections are read by someone other than Proenneke, but the voice is a perfect fit to the text and image. Because the text is not exactly Proenneke's and the voice of the video isn't his either, our experience of the man is filtered though these interpreations. Sam Keith hasn't shown us any unedited examples from the "rough journals" he used to compose the book, so it's difficult to know how far this beautifully crafted language matches the character and psychology of Richard Proenneke.

It is an extraordinary book and was a great pleasure to read. I recommend it without reservation.

Editorial Review:

To live in a pristine land . . . roam the wilderness . . . build a home. . . . Thousands have had such dreams, but Richard Proenneke lived them. Here is a tribute to a man who carved his masterpiece out of the beyond.

America In Space: NASA's First Fifty Years (Nasa)

Steven Dick, Robert Jacobs, Constance Moore, Bertram Ulrich

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

NASA launches a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary in the fall of 2007, and Abrams is privileged to publish this visual history of its many achievements in manned and unmanned space travel. Written and edited by a team of experienced NASA staffers, and illustrated with many unpublished and rare photographs from the voluminous NASA archives scattered across the country, America in Space offers an unparalleled vision of half a century of exploration and discovery.

The story of America’s space age is told with more than 400 carefully selected images. The story begins in the 1950s with intrepid test pilots venturing ever faster and higher, and opens out into the now-legendary Mercury and Apollo missions of the 1960s that made astronauts into national heroes. The space shuttle era shows us what everyday space travel might look like, while grand vistas of the universe expand our sense of wonder. The large format of the book captures both the human drama and the vast scale of NASA’s projects. America in Space is a photographic record of the greatest adventure of our time.

Tales of the Road: Highway 61

Cathy Wurzer

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Editorial Review:

Highway 61 traces approximately 440 miles through Minnesota, from Pigeon Falls at the Canadian border south to La Crescent. Along the way, the road hugs the North Shore, zips through St. Paul, and navigates bluffs along the Mississippi River. While places such as Split Rock Lighthouse or Sugar Loaf Mountain offer well-documented stopping-off points, observant travelers may wonder about historic buildings , abandoned sites, and decaying structures they see along the way.

In this companion book to a new Twin Cities Public Television documentary also called Tales of the Road (airing in November 2008), Cathy Wurzer unearths stories about these places and more as she travels down the road and into the past, spotlighting famous and fascinating locations, many of them little remembered today. Learn about bootleggers crossing the St. Croix by ferry or importing hooch from Canada onboard vessels designed in White Bear Lake. Visualize--or maybe even visit--the quaint tourist cabins, supper clubs, and lodges that served tourists who began motoring up the road in the 1920s. Take stock of historic and current industries: Russ Kendall's Smokehouse in Knife River, a rutabaga plant in Willow River, the pottery factory in Red Wing. Each tale is illustrated with historic and current views to show how much-or how little-Highway 61 has changed. Here's one road trip you won't want to miss!

Cathy Wurzer is host of Morning Edition on Minnesota Public Radio and cohost of Almanac on Twin Cities Public Television. She has been honored with four Emmys for her work on Almanac.

Wonderland: A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith

Jason Eskenazi

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Editorial Review:

The story of Communism is the story of the twentieth century. For many, the Soviet Union existed, like their childhood, as a fairy tale where many of the realities of life were hidden from plain view. When the Berlin Wall finally fell, so too did the illusion of that utopia. Wonderland is a photographic exploration that portrays both the reality beneath the veneer of a utopian USSR and the affirmation of hope that should never be abandoned. And like all fairy tales try to teach us: the hard lessons of self-reliance.

Jason Eskenazi was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Taylor Prize.

Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867–1957 (The Northwest Photography Series)

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Columbia River Gorge exerts a powerful influence on the lives and imaginations of the inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. For people who live here today, just as for those Native Americans and European settlers who preceded us, this dramatic natural landform is a source of awe. Since the 1860s it has inspired superb photographers who have framed and interpreted the way we see the Gorge, and who have in turn had their artistic vision shaped by this compelling landscape. The ninety-year period covered in Wild Beauty was a critical one in the river’s history. Over thousands of years the wild, free-flowing torrent of the Columbia River carved a passage—the Columbia River Gorge—through the Cascade Mountain Range. In the 1860s, when the first photographers arrived, the Gorge still looked much the same as it had when Lewis and Clark made their way down the river in 1805, and indeed as it had for centuries before that, when the native peoples’ culture of fishing and trade thrived along the river’s banks. In the mid-twentieth century, the character of the river was fundamentally altered by the construction of hydroelectric dams. Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen have selected more than 130 images—most of them previously unpublished and many of them never before available for public view—by some three dozen photographers to chronicle the history of photography in the Gorge. Wild Beauty begins in 1867 with images by the legendary Carleton Watkins, creator of some of the greatest landscape photographs of the nineteenth century. Later photographers include Benjamin Gifford, Lily White, Sarah Ladd, Fred Kizer, Alfred Monner, and Ray Atkeson. The volume ends in 1957 with the completion of The Dalles Dam, which drowned Celilo Falls and with it the historic site where Indians had fished for millennia.The images in this beautifully designed volume are presented one to a spread, with captions on the facing pages. The book is organized into five chronological sections, each with a brief introduction; a map shows the locations where the photographs were made. The photographs have been meticulously restored and are exquisitely reproduced in four-color process to capture the subtle coloration and nuanced tonal values of albumen prints, gelatin silver prints, platinum prints, hand-colored photographs, and early Kodachromes.The photography of Watkins and his successors is a significant piece of the cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest. Readers interested in the history of the Columbia River and the photography of the developing American West will be enthralled by the book’s scope and artistry. And those who love the Gorge’s stunning beauty will welcome how this volume has captured its grandeur.Wild Beauty represents, in the words of one reviewer, “a culmination of decades of research, exhibition, and total immersion in the geology, history, and photography of the Columbia River Gorge.” Oregon State University Press is proud to partner with the Northwest Photography Archive to publish this remarkable volume.

Route 66 Lost & Found: Ruins and Relics Revisited

Russell A. Olsen

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Lost and Found 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Both volume one and two are very interesting and well researched books.
I traveled Route 66 a couple of years ago and reading the book was fascinating- now I know how many locations I went sailing past without a clue!
When I next get a chance to do a repeat journey, I shall certainly re-read the books very thoroughly and travel slower so as not to miss such historic scenes.

Editorial Review:

Route 66: Lost and Found conveys the spirit and the times, not quite like any other book. Arizona Daily SunFor several decades, Route 66 was the nation's main east-west thoroughfare, pointing Middle America toward all the promise California seemed to hold at various times, whether permanent refuge from the Dust Bowl or a temporary escape from the drudgery of everyday suburban life in prosperous postwar America. As such, America's Main Street once teemed with activity . . . bustling centers of commerce that evaporated into the vast American landscape like the jet contrails overhead and the heat rising from the Interstate asphalt. This engaging look at the "Mother Road" takes 75 locations along its 2,297 mile route from Chicago to Santa Monica and shows them first during their halcyon heydays through black-and-white photographs and period postcards, then on the facing page as they appear today, from the exact same angle and also through vivid black-and-white photographs.

Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments

Michael Eastman, William H. Gass

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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Think of the quirky buildings you pass every day but whose quiet beauty you take for granted—the moviehouses, juke joints, soda fountains, barbershops, roadside diners, and storefront churches. You don’t miss them until they’re gone. As suburban sprawl and strip malls conquer the country, these vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Here the photographer Michael Eastman has made the ultimate road trip, crisscrossing the nation dozens of times, to capture these buildings on film before they vanish. These dreamy images call us to question what we choose to let go in the wake of contemporary life, with a cool melancholy that evokes the work of Edward Hopper, Jack Kerouac, and William Eggleston. There is a wry sense of humor here as well. The book delights in the idiosyncracies of America’s vernacular styles, ranging from Depression Deco to New England clapboard in random juxtapositions that accrue over time in a town’s landscape. Countless visual puns arise among the book’s many detailed images of signs and statuettes. Vanishing America catalogues great everyday American architecture and design. But it also offers a provocative portrait of the silent emptiness that has descended upon vanishing small communities everywhere.