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Brianne Leckness: My mom left me at a church when I was three. She used to travel with the carnival, and the carnival ended up going broke in Iowa. When my mom and my stepfather had a hard day, they’d take it out on me. So she left me at this church with our dog Freddy. She pinned a note to my shirt that said, “Please take care of her. We can’t any longer.” On my 18th birthday, my mother blew into town. She wanted us to go on The Montel Williams Show and say how she really never wanted to give me up. She asked me to move in with her in Florida and start a new life. That didn’t work out, so I came back to Des Moines, where I’ve been for six years. I met a guy from Honduras and he didn’t speak a lick of English. I got pregnant, then we broke up. After that, I really got into partying. I’d stay out till three or four in the morning. I liked drinking. I met another guy at a bar, and I got pregnant again. Now I live with the fathers of both my children and another guy. Nothing for me has been normal, so why should now be normal?
In the spring and summer of 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein announced that he wanted to take free portraits of everyone in Oxford, Iowa (pop. 673). By the end of the summer, he’d photographed 670 Oxford residents. Twenty-one years later, Feldstein went back, and this time he brought along writer Stephen G. Bloom to document people’s stories. The Oxford Project (Welcome Books) is the remarkable portrait of a small town, as Bloom notes below, “virtually untouched by both the vitality and vulgarity of urban America.”
(via The Oxford Project - The Morning News)
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