The Portraits of Pigeon Hill by Jeffrey Wolin is a fascinating visual overview over time symbolized by the subtitle of the series "then and now".
All these photographs were taken in the Pigeon Hill * neighborhood Bloomington - Indiana, whose reputation has been and remains dangerous proven with a lot of crime, drug networks and recurrent poverty. From 1987 to 1991, the photographer with the help of a Guggenheim scholarship went to photograph the inhabitants of this district, charging his photographs of an immediate emotional resonance, which exhales a particular emotion. The use of black and white adds a discomfort, which there is doubt in the first vision in front of these double portraits, strengthening the table yet homogenized with the look of old documents, as emerged from the past and extradited to modernity.
Indeed, in early 2011 Jeffrey Wolin alerted by an article in the local newspaper of Bloomington describing the death of a person met twenty years earlier, pushed his curiosity to return to the scene of the photo crime, in order to regain his old acquaintances. Then later in the process of Vietnam Veterans, he developed an artistic project using anthropological and poetic dimension, inhabited by this evidence of the influence that has social and environmental sphere for the future of human behaviour, not to mention the feeling of familiarity almost tactile contact with these simple, touching and tragic stories because there are human, almost too human.
Jeffrey Wolin not content to tell us the ravages of time on this objective body image, as in the famous series of Nicholas Nixon "the Brown sisters ' simultaneously develops a desire to build a life story ; a sort of family album sur- lined each of his subjects, for which he integrates into the very texture of the image of handwritten sentences ; biographical notations that recount épisodes, memories and moods of their experiences. These images captioned establish a psychological continuity in what was maybe only disparate and discontinuous times unrelated other than the social identity of these individuals. To give meaning to life, to life, to be a meaningful memory for both the people themselves , in order to perpetuate their testimony by confronting them with their own history, and to a public that may deepen further realities, is the leading project of "Pigeon Hill" presented for the first time in France .
The operator has never been indifferent to the sufferings of his anonymous models, which returned an identity mirror reconstituted or revisited in the story and therefore affirmed dignity, or accepted: the famous amor fati. And although these seemingly mundane images, due to their social context, become edifying as simply says Jean Louis Poitevin: "It is not necessary to be a great genius to know that these people had little chance of escape the fate that any society ses to those who are born poor. "
But the abstract clock time is not the psychological time, or for those photographed entered in these chosen and privileged moments, nor the viewer with its permeable sensitivity met or interviewed by the silent expressions of these faces becoming signifiers. And because of this confrontation across the gap of time, twenty years after instant overview, can mentally recreate a universal psychological narrative in a continuum of life.