April 2 – May 2, 1992
My first photo/text series was a series of photographs which address the creative nature of memory. I wrote narrative text directly onto the surface of my photographic prints using archival black and silver ink. The stories I told are mostly concerned with formative childhood, adolescent and early adult experiences that seem to have guided me into becoming the person I am today.
Several pieces deal with the harmful influence the war in Vietnam had upon me and my whole generation; one is a childhood recollection of my arthritic father and his job as a butcher which he detested. I did a piece called “Police Days” which contained a series of vignettes recounting my experiences as a police photographer documenting corpses, victims of child abuse and so on. After a while I began to deal more in biography, distilling important episodes in other peoples’ lives and combining the narratives with portraits. “Mišo Remembers Auschwitz” is the grim account of one Holocaust survivor’s experiences during World War II.
While the text is important, it is absolutely essential to me that it be visually integrated into the positive or negative space of the photograph. I should add that it is quite natural for me to work with words and images. My undergraduate degree was in literature and I studied creative writing for some time. I also spent six years designing and printing limited edition books using a letterpress. I received my MFA degree in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology where I minored in typography and printing. My Master’s thesis was, in fact, a book of related photographs and writing.
Influences on my work include Black American folk artists (Sister Gertrude Morgan, e.g.), film (especially Truffaut and Fellini), literature (mostly non fiction, including Primo Levi, Steven Jay Gould, Scott Sanders, John McPhee but also the sublime fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut).
I am indebted to medieval illuminated manuscripts for their elegant handling of image and text. My work is actually the exact opposite of those manuscripts which are literature embellished by visual art. My pieces are images embellished by text. I sometimes felt like a medieval scribe while working on the small editions I made of my photographs with text. As I copied the words from one photograph to the next, the story usually changed a bit- it is difficult to match handwriting exactly within the existing space, or I got a better idea for how I want to phrase something- so no two prints from an edition are precisely the same.
Jeffrey A. Wolin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of Photography at Indiana University. Wolin’s photographs have been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions in the US and Europe, including solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, International Center of Photography in New York, George Eastman Museum in Rochester and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and LA County Museum of Art. His career retrospective, Portraying Memory, opened recently at the Eskenazi Museum of Art.
His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Cleveland Museum of Art; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; New York Public Library; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Wolin’s work is included in dozens of books including seven monographs: Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, Chronicle Books, San Francisco; Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans, Umbrage Editions, New York; Stone Country, Indiana University Press, Bloomington; Pigeon Hill: Then & Now, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg & Berlin; Faces of Homelessness, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg; Portraying Memory, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. Other publications include Swimmers, Aperture, New York; Waterproof, Editions Stemmle, Zurich; An American Century of Photography, Abrams, New York; Searching for Memory, Basic Books, New York; Common Ground, Merrell, London & New York; and Mémoire des Camps, Editions Marval, Paris.
Wolin is the recipient of two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.