Oma's Homage

Oma's Door, Peterson, Iowa 4/91

In 1990 and 1991, I spent a year in a tiny town in northwest Iowa--Peterson, Iowa--to write and photograph a book about small towns and their place in the landscape.

Why Peterson? Many in my family had lived here, though I grew up elsewhere. Population at the time was about 200.

Early on in my work, I spotted Oma Rohrbaugh's front door, and marveled at the wonderful scenes pasted into its panels. I asked her if I might photograph it, and she agreed, though she was mystified by my interest. I brought my cameras by one April day, and I asked her where the pictures had come from and why she had made the aesthetic effort to paste them thereon.

"Why, I had a bank calendar, and the year was over, and I loved the pictures. It looked like they'd fit on the door, so I pasted them on. It's an old door and needed some decorating," she told me.

I love the effect, and I love the photograph. Beyond merely sprucing up her sagging door, she created a fine homage to the landscapes of American iconography: a New England barn, western mountains in snow, a sunny beach someplace.

Oma died some years ago, and her tiny house on the south edge of Peterson, Iowa, was torn down long ago, and I suspect I have most of the evidence that this place ever existed.

Reflecting a Prairie Town: A Year in Peterson is the book that came from my lovely year of research, writing and photographing here. Published by the University of Iowa Press in 1994, the book combines image and word in what I think are particularly effective ways.