The Oxford Project

I am always interested when people take a different look at life. Whether it's literally looking at things from a different angle or piecing together divergent elements in order to say something about who we are as human beings.

I hate to keep borrowing links I found over at The Online Photographer but as I was over there today I thought that this was an interesting concept, he always seems to find fascinating stuff. The Oxford Project started back in 1984 when photographer Peter Feldstein setup his camera on Augusta Street in Oxford, Iowa (pop. 673). 21 years later Peter returned to Oxford with writer Stephen G. Bloom to capture its residents once again. They documented how many of the original 670 subjects had changed during the intervening years, both physically and by allowing them to tell their stories.

When I was reading about this endeavor I was reminded, somehow, of a post I wrote in June about The One Hundred Images Project. If you are unfamiliar - or don't want to go back to read my other post - two photographers from different parts of the country (they both used to be in Chicago until one moved to NYC) take shots of the world around them each week over the course of a year, totally independent of each other, and then post them side by side to offer a unique perspective.

Ever since I first came across this site I felt like it would be a cool project to try. Not only would it be a good excuse to shoot more often than I have been, it would offer a new way of looking at the world - which is what it's all about anyway.

Now that I have more of a readership than I did back in June, I'd like to extend the invitation once again to anyone who might be interested in taking part in something like this with me. I'm not sure what we'd call it (I'm open to suggestions) but it would only require committing to shoot something once a week, processing the image and sending the file to me. And I'll take care of managing it. We wouldn't consult with each other on theme or subject matter but, as the other project does, I think it'd be interesting if we both tried to shoot on the same day during the same time period to add another dimension to the project.

If you're interested, please email me (jason at jasondmoore dot com) and we'll work from there. If there's more than one person interested, I think it could only add to it, so please let me know.