Peter fields comments from neighbors as they pose in his Oxford studio:

Come on, Peter. What do you want with all these pictures? What for, anyway?
-- I don't know. For history, I guess.
Are you getting paid for this?
-- No.
Just for something to do?! . . . God!!
-- Why are you shaking your head?
I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do anything for this town. It's a dump, and the people are ass holes. I can't wait to get out of here.

So, Peter, what should I say this is for? I've got to tell my sister something.
-- Just a look at Oxford, 1984, a little slice of history.
Yeah, that's great! Don't worry. I'm sure I can get her to come. We'll round them all up. Her husband may give me a hard time, but I'll get him, get the kids, too. The whole crew!

* * *

Peter Feldstein is an artist and a teacher among other things. Away from home he is best known for his photographs. Some of them are permanently displayed in urban museums, national banks, and insurance companies. Others are featured every year in group shows and an occasional solo. Galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York show his 30-by-40 inch prints and sell them for $500 to $1000 each. Given the cost of working in cibachrome, even on Peter's do-it-yourself basis, sales barely exceed expenses. Art photography is hardly lucrative. But with a university appointment, Peter has the support to reach passionately for the limit of his art.

Since the late 1960s his photographs have grown increasingly abstract. In recent ones you might detect the innards of a battery, fragments of painted glass, old plaster, wire, or paper. These are among the elements of Peter's subject, his "constructions," but the photographs are not quite pictures of anything. They evoke more general ideas, concepts of vibrancy and color, tensions between plane and line or shadow and depth. The best pictures do not "catch" or render a subject; they "work."

I must admit that they do not work very well for me. My sense of fine art is embarrassingly crude. The only modern art I readily appreciate is a folk variety. Since the late 1960s, I have used my university salary to pursue the extraordinary experience of more ordinary working people, plumbers more often than poets or artists. After seven years on the same Iowa campus, Peter and I recall only that we might have met.

We met more memorably in the Spring of 1984, when corraled by a mutual friend, state folklorist Steve Ohrn. Over a beer, Peter explained his plans for the summer. He had to teach, and he vowed to continue restoring the aged store front where he lived. With the remaining time he wanted to photograph everyone in his town -- one at a time, all 700 residents of Oxford, sixteen miles west of Iowa City. He would put full-body views on 4-by-5 inch black-and-white film. People would be encouraged to come and pose as they choose: "Just be comfortable." But they would all stand against a plain background, an old tarp in front of a fixed camera and lights, in a vacant downtown office (courtesy of the mayor) across the street from Peter's "house." He would contact print the negatives, 50 to 60 at a time, on massive sheets of paper. The effect would be something like the seniors section of a high school yearbook: "Oxford '84." The Iowa Arts Council (sensing a good way to bring Culture to the prole) already agreed to pay about $1000 for materials.

This would be, then, a remarkable shift for Peter. He would begin making, not only pictures of things, but also pictures of people, subjects who can be busy, forgetful, or ornery. I could not imagine their total cooperation, even with the unified support of Iowa Rotarians, Girl Scouts, and 4-Hers. Moreover, Peter was working in Oxford, a notoriously unruly place. While nearby villagers commemorate a late pastor or friend of Herbert Hoover, Oxford folks recount rowdy escapades of yore. Like other Midwestern boroughs, Oxford has long shown signs of dying, but this one will go down raising hell. I could not be sure how Peter's neighbors would greet his plan. But I knew they would not lie there like studio constructions.

It would also be a remarkable shift for me. Steve and Peter first guessed I might offer generic prose -- a sketch of smalltown Iowa or biographies of the folk. But I resisted. The more challenging focus would be Peter himself. Why would an abstract artist want to make, in his words, "an objective record" of Oxford, 1984? He said he was making it "for posterity," for "history." But what sort of history would he make?

Of course, the short answer is in the photographs themselves. They are simple, direct, and amazingly complete. Peter captured 670 people on film, 95% of the town, including invalids and infants. The small number of omissions can be attributed to truly extraordinary circumstances. Door prizes would not have helped. Patricipants seem pleased with the results. They glance through the pictures: "Oh yeah, there's so-and-so! Isn't that just like him? Wouldn't you know he'd wear that hat. I wonder what his sister thinks of it . . ." No one complained of distortion, favoritism, condescension, or any other sort of bias. They had come as they are, and that is what they saw: "Won't it be great to look back at these when the kids are grown? We ought to do this every few years." Cynicism was imperceptible, even among the town's most notorious delinquents. They claimed the photos as their own, "our" pictures for "our" history.

In a sense, they are simply right. With few exceptions, people dressed and stood as they might for a family candid on a Saturday afternoon. Peter just provided the occasion. Some people chose to bring props, a guitar or a pet; some gestured, smiled, or scowled. And somehow, most agreed, they were comfortably and characteristically "themselves."

No one was forced to participate. Prodding was purely local -- the mayor, Post officers of the American Legion, neighbors. For the first couple of weeks only children and old-timers readily posed, and a few (most often middle-aged men) rudely refused. Peter became discouraged. But within two and a half months nearly everyone joined in. Some came because they felt close to Peter or sorry for him; some because they were curious or nagged by the right kin; some because the project was good for the town or too petty to resist. But in the end the pictures were truly collective creations.

Truly but not thoroughly. Peter was the one who had the idea, who donated hours in the darkroom and money when the grant ran out. He chose the equipment and the format, the repetitious grid that so strikes out-of-towners. He chose the time of year. (Who, besides an academic or a Jew from New York would start a community project when there is cultivating, first hay, and side dressing to do?) He was the one who explained how to "come as you are" -- not dudded for a formal portrait or busy on the job, but as you might look at home on the weekend. Certainly people could have been "themselves" in their uniforms or Sunday-best. For example, one teacher countered that no one would even recognize him without a jacket and tie. He posed, though, in his gardening pants and an open shirt. Peter also controlled the negatives. He decided which ones to reshoot and which duplicates to neglect. He arranged them (albeit "pretty randomly") in the contact prints. He greeted and faced every child, man, and woman as they stood. For posterity the pictures are his no less than theirs.

I do not mean to suggest that Peter abused his control. He was not trying to use it for any clearly premeditated purpose. In the beginning, Peter admits, he was infatuated with Oxford, and he thought the project might boost local spirits. Like a 1950s sociologist he rhapsodized community -- intimacy, irrationality, tradition, and guts. He would not have to compose each picture because the subjects would do it. Just being themselves, they would be interesting, naturally. He held that view even as I and his wife expressed our doubts. But when some of the neighbors showed they could be suspicious or rude and when some of the portraits came out undeniably dull, he began to change his mind. He still deeply cared for the town but now less blindly. Even so, his changes of sentiment did not affect the portraits. In July as in May, people were photographed as innocently as they stood. Peter aimed for a form and a process, not a particular effect, least of all simply to flatter or condemn his subjects.

That is how he works. A friend confided, "Peter is less a photographer, painter, or sculptor than a bricoleur." He plays with ordinary art supplies and found materials. He discovers what he will make as he makes it. All of his art, then, this "objective record" like his abstractions, is a changing mix of Peter, his subject, materials, concept, and craft.

The mix is barely evident to most of his neighbors. They look through the pictures to the subject, familiar signs of Gina or Bob. The mix is just as obscure for strangers. They look for tributes or parodies of solemn Iowans. Or they find "rhythms" among the portraits, as if they were product codes. But as Peter talks about the project and his earlier work, the quality and significance of the mix become more evident.

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