Famous Relatives–Imagine my surprise when I opened the January 14, 2011 issue of the Minnesota Outdoor News, The Sportsman’s Weekly, and saw an article about my second cousin, Rich Oxley.
Rich is my cousin on my fraternal side. He’s published a book full of antique sporting photos taken by members of his famous photographer family lineage!
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Rich has gone through thousands of sporting photographs taken by his grandfather, father, and uncle and compiled them into a 200+ page, coffee-table-style book.
The new book details the family photography business work from the 1900s, highlighting primarily Minnesota sportsmen of the time called, “Oxley Outdoors: Classic American Sporting Photography from the Golden Age of Hunting, Fishing & Trapping.“
Rich’s grandfather, W.T. Oxley, was an avid sportsman and also took an interest in photography, quickly becoming very prolific.
Shortly after the turn of the century, in 1906, W.T.’s photography business really took off as he photographed families, tractors, cars, and for real estate companies.
W.T. Oxley was also the first photographer to take aerial photos of Fergus Falls and the state hospital, and received many awards from the Minnesota Photographers Association, (now defunct).
Two of W.T.’s sons, Elmer and Lloyd, Rich’s father, were also hunters and fishermen and eventually worked in the family photography business.
They took pictures of sportsmen and trappers getting ducks, deer, pheasants, prairie chickens, and fish of all kinds.
This book is of interest to sportsmen of all kinds and also history buffs, because these precious photos are of a time long since past.
Times were very hard, and of course, there was no such thing as our modern-day technical hunting and fishing equipment as we have now to make the sport less harsh.
Travel was difficult both by car and by boat, extra-warm clothing for winter was hard to come by, to say nothing of having the luxury of using a GPS.
Advanced technology like; insulated sleeping bags, heated tents and ice-shacks, battery-operated warming socks, hand-warmers, television sets, and DVRs weren’t available back then, like they are for today’s sportsmen.
“Oxley Outdoors: Classic American Sporting Photography from the Golden Age of Hunting, Fishing & Trapping,” by Rich Oxley, is published by L&M Press, a Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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