Jeffrey Wolin brings his Guggenheim Award-winning images to the TEDxBloomington stage, weaving a story of the residents of Bloomington's Pigeon Hill neighborhood, a place of public housing, poverty, and violence, yet seemingly invisible to most Bloomingtonians. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wolin became a known as "Picture Man" on the streets of Pigeon Hill, shooting hundreds of photographs following the murder of an Indiana University graduate student living there. In 2010, when he heard the news that Pigeon Hill resident Crystal Grubb was murdered, he recognized her as someone he'd known and photographed as a child. Wolin returned to find the people he'd photographed thirty or more years ago, to learn what they'd experienced in the meantime, and to make hundreds more photos, bookending the experience.
Wolin is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Photography at Indiana University School of Fine Arts, where he served as Director from 1994-2002. He has been awarded two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his photographs with text. His work, "Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust," "Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans" and "New Faces at the Crossroads: The World in Central Indiana," include a unique blend of images and stories about people. His work has been exhibited in over 75 solo and group shows in the US and Europe.
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