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Wolin’s method of altering his photographs with handwritten
text is also rooted in the works of Southern folk artists
such as Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan, who
frequently combined painting and drawing with religious
scriptures.
“What they did was beautiful to me; it wasn’t what the words
said or the specificity of their vision, but it was the way
they combined visual art and writing on a flat surface.” By
imbuing images with written narratives in the style of folk
artists, Wolin made his breakthrough into the art world.
As a photography professor at Indiana University in
Bloomington, Wolin noticed an uncomfortable divide
between the university’s campus and the town that
surrounds it. This tension informs Wolin’s
Pigeon Hill
series.
The shocking 1986 murder of EllenMarks, a former Indiana
University student, in Pigeon Hill brought the nation’s
attention to the conditions in Bloomington’s projects and
hit close to home for Wolin. About a mile away from
campus, Pigeon Hill is located on a bluff overlooking the
west side of town. Wolin’s photographs were taken on a
specific portion of the Hill, called Crestmont — the housing
projects. Between 1987 to 1991, Wolin took regular trips
to the projects to photograph the residents, many of whom
asked him to take their pictures. He became affectionately
known as “Picture-Man.”
During this period, Wolin was granted a prestigious
Guggenheim Fellowship, with the hopes that he would
wrap up his portrait series. But the project began to weigh
on him, as he felt that he wasn’t communicating clearly what
the project was and seemed to be repeating himself. “The
stories were too sad; it seemed like there was no redemption,”
Wolin said. Setting the
Pigeon Hill
project aside, Wolin
began to photograph Vietnam veterans and Holocaust
survivors. His award winning work with Holocaust
survivors in the Midwest was published as
Written in
Memory
(1997), and exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago
and the International Center of Photography in New York.
In 2010, another murder, reported only in the local
Bloomington newspaper, would serve as the catalyst for
Wolin’s return to Pigeon Hill. “It was a 29-year-old woman,
and I recognized her as one of the kids that I photographed.
Her name was Crystal Grubb. I went back and looked in
my boxes and found pictures of her,” Wolin said. After
contacting a friend who worked at the newspaper, Wolin
was able to find Crystal’s parents on the Hill. This led to a
desire to follow up with his old subjects — starting in 2011,
he re-photographed and interviewed close to a hundred
people.
Many of the original subjects of Pigeon Hill still lived there,
and were happy to see toWolin again. “When I’d meet with
somebody, we would go through old contact sheets and
they’d identify themselves, their family, their friends. That
was how I re-established my network.” Once in a while,
they would show Wolin a treasured photograph that he
printed for them 20 years earlier. “They would get excited
about a car in the background, they would identify when
they lived at this address, when this person was alive, or
when someone moved.”The portraits became documents of
personal history, family history, and neighborhood history.
Artist Jeffrey Wolin. Image courtesy of Indiana University.