Photographer and retired IU professor Jeffrey Wolin doesn’t remember the first photograph he took, but he remembers the camera: a Kodak Brownie Starmite he bought with his saved allowance money.
Since then, Wolin has photographed multiple portrait series, including those of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam War veterans, all with the theme of change over time. One of these projects began in Bloomington 30 years ago.
Crestmont Public Housing, or Pigeon Hill, is a mere two miles from Sample Gates, yet students rarely venture to the housing development. However, the murder of Ellen Marks, an English graduate student at IU, in 1986 and what Wolin did to follow united the two communities.
A former police photographer between his undergraduate and graduate years, Wolin was immediately intrigued when he heard about the murder.
“Curiosity brought me to Crestmont,” Wolin said.
Fears about his safety on his first visit prompted him to ask a student to accompany him. However, he quickly realized the precaution was unnecessary.
He walked down the streets of the housing development with his camera and asked to take photos of everyone he encountered. He became Crestmont’s “Picture Man,” photographing new babies, proms, weddings and other momentous events in the area, always returning the following week to give prints of his photographs to their subjects.
“I was free pictures, and I was good,” he said.
Wolin started going to the housing development more frequently, taking photos and talking to residents. The residents shared life stories filled with violence, drug abuse and the hardships of living in poverty, and Wolin took diligent notes. These stories now overlay the original photographs.
“The stories became equally important as the photographs themselves,” he said.
Wolin’s Pigeon Hill portraits capture the lives of individuals mired in squalor, and the daily struggles accompanying the impoverished conditions.
After a few years, Wolin began working on other projects, like his portraits of Vietnam War veterans. The Pigeon Hill portraits remained in storage until 2010, when Wolin read about the murder of one of the children in his photographs, Crystal Grubb. He returned to Pigeon Hill and spoke to Grubb’s parents, and, in hearing stories about her, began to wonder about the rest of the residents he photographed.
Wolin started volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club’s summer photography classes. After each class, he walked down the streets of Pigeon Hill with boxes of the photographs from the 1980s, asking residents to look inside to identify the portraits’ subjects.
Eventually, Wolin made a connection to one of his original subjects. For the next three years, he located, interviewed and photographed more than 100 of his original subjects from nearly 25 years prior. Once again, he was “Picture Man.”
“Photography has a strong connection to moments in time,” he said. “It’s a way of describing the world.”
Wolsin wanted the portraits from the 1980s and 2010s to emphasize the subject as the focal point while also showing the environment and personal characteristics. He also asked subjects to reflect on the former version of themselves captured in the earlier photographs, overlaying the new photographs with these musings.
“Pigeon Hill, and really all of my projects, are a merging of the past and present,” he said. “My photographs are picking up a thread in someone’s life and seeing where it leads.”
Wolin completed “Pigeon Hill: Then and Now” in 2013. The project debuted at La Galerie Le Bleu du Ciel in Lyon, France, in November 2013 and will be published in early 2017.
