View from the final descent near Albuquerque, New Mexico
On Thursday, April 16 at 7 p.m. CST, the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research institute and library at the University of Texas at Austin, will be screening a live webcast of photographer Peter Feldstein as he discusses his new book The Oxford Project. Feldstein will read from the book and give a narrated slide presentation, followed by a question-and-answer discussion.
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 flyers 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. He invited writer Stephen G. Bloom to join him, and together they went in search of the Oxford residents Feldstein originally shot in 1984. Some had moved. Most had stayed. Others had passed away. All were marked by the passage of time.
What emerges is a living portrait of Small Town, USA, told with the words and images of its residents—then and now—and textured by their own words. It tells the compelling story of one archetypal American community—its struggles, accomplishments, failures, and secrets—and how it has both changed and stayed the same over the course of the years.
More information on the project here: http://www.oxfordproject.com/about.html
There will be a webcast of the program at www.hrc.utexas.edu/webcast.
Paula McCartney (American, b. 1971)
Bird Watching (Aqua Tanager), 2004
C-print
10 × 10 inches on 11 × 14 inch paper
Edition of 50
5 jpegs, Jen Bekman as juror, prizes from Blurb, and a 47 dollar entry fee. That's the lowdown on this one.There is no entry fee. The deadline is April 30th at midnight.
The Unnatural Nature of Food.
Food in our society has an interesting journey from, as the expression goes, "farm to table." Unknown farmers and hard working, often migrant laborers pick the food, package it and load it into trucks, ships and trains. It arrives at the supermarket where the average consumer is disconnected with (and often indifferent to) how their food got to his or her table. This call for entry is for work documenting all aspects of food, from production to consumption — from studies of agrarian communities, practices and lifestyles to exploration of how fast food has affected our culture and everything in between.
Specs: All images should be jpgs, 72 dpi, 1000 pixels on the longest side. Please email jpgs images titled lastname.firstname.image1 and so on to photographs@melaniemcwhorter.com. All images should be emailed with an additional document labeled lastname.firstname.text containing an artist statement about the project, if applicable, a title list and artist website address. Please list your name and email address at the top of the document.
10.25 in. x 12.25 in. / 184 pages / 89 tritone images / Casebound with jacket / Edition of 1200
In the spring of 2000, Richard Renaldi began making frequent trips to the small New England city of Fall River, Massachusetts. Situated just a short distance from the Atlantic coast, Fall River was once at the very center of American textile manufacturing. Renaldi’s aim was to photograph the young men of Fall River coming of age amidst an industrial landscape well past its boom years. This extraordinary body of images—both portraits and landscapes—is gathered here for the first time in Renaldi’s second monograph, Fall River Boys.
The resulting photographs, made over the course of nine years, are not brief encounters. Renaldi’s quiet gaze considers his subjects with neither judgment nor irony. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a city where young men grow into manhood surrounded by a landscape of idyllic natural beauty, frayed at the margins by darkened relics of an industrial past. Like the city of Fall River itself, the boys looking directly into Renaldi’s lens face an uncertain future, at once hinting of possibility yet promising nothing.
Fall River Boys is a beautiful, clothbound volume of 89 black-and-white images reproduced in rich tritone and published in an edition of 1200. The introduction is an original essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham."
