Thetis - knowledge for a better environment

On Monday, 15 June at 18:00 in the Thetis conference room at the Arsenale, American writer Stephen G. Bloom will present "The Oxford Project: A slice of America", a conference organized by the Italo-British Circle of Venice. This work is the result of a project conceived by the photographer Peter Feldstein and the writer Stephen G. Bloom, professor of Narrative Journalism at the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa (USA). Approximately twenty works are used to describe a sort of American story in images. The first photos in the project date from 1984: every single resident of the town of Oxford (a small community of 676 inhabitants) was photographed in impromptu shots taken on the main street. In 2004, twenty years later, Feldstein photographed the same people once again: the children had become adults, with some of them now mothers and fathers themselves, and the people who were already adults in 1984 had grown older. The collection of personal stories and portraits that will be presented tells the tale of a small American town: a community built on complex interpersonal and family relationships, where everyone knows everybody, where the American spirit is visible, and something more. The writer Bloom gathered together a cross-section of daily life by successfully creating a friendly rapport with the people he interviewed, uncovering memories and confessions that he then sifted through to create extraordinary, authentic texts. The words of the truck driver, the housewife, the hunter, and the florist: their stories are captured in photographs, narrating their tale without realizing that they are actually telling the story of the common people, of mankind as a whole.
The panels with the photographs and texts will be on display in Padua as part of the "Padova Aprile Fotografia 2009: Forme dell'identità - The Oxford Project" exhibition until 20 June.
The exhibit, curated by Amy N. Worthen and Enrico Gussella, is located in Palazzo Zuckermann, on Corso Garibaldi 29, and is open the following hours:
Monday to Saturday: 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00, free admission, closed Sunday
Info: http://cnf.padovanet.it/