Photo by Jeffrey Wolin
BY MIKE LEONARD
Jeffrey Wolin’s photo essay “Pigeon Hill: Then and Now” is prominent in a concurrent three-venue exhibit in Bloomington at the Indiana University Art Museum, the Monroe County History Center, and Pictura Gallery. On April 19, Wolin will lead a tour to the three venues culminating with a reception at Pictura.
The Pigeon Hill project features pairs of photographs of residents from the low-income northwest area of town, historically known as “Pigeon Hill” or “The Hill.” Wolin shot hundreds of photographs of youths in the neighborhood, particularly at the Crestmont Apartments, from 1987–91 and returned and rephotographed “well over 100 people” from 2010–13. Six sets of those photographs are presented here.
The overall exhibition also includes photographs from projects that became the books Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans, and Stone Country. The unusual three-venue exhibition commemorates Wolin’s imminent retirement at age 64 as the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Photography at the Indiana University Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts with a broad sampling of his images.
Wolin worked the Pigeon Hill project hard for four years, then moved on to other projects after being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Artist Talk with Jeffrey Wolin by the Catherine Edelman Gallery
