WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Yesterday, The Limestone Post, put up a piece by WFIU’s Yaël Ksander about the collaborative work of photographer Jeff Wolin, and Scott Sanders, a master of the nature essay, called Stone Country. The two return to the work in a new edition with the subtitle: Then and Now.
The young professors spent a year and a half documenting Indiana’s legendary vein of stone — “the largest accessible deposit of premium building stone in the United States,” as Sanders writes — and getting to know the people who worked it. The result was Stone Country, published by IU Press in 1985. The volume paired Wolin’s black-and-white photographs of quarries, workers, and limestone structures with Sanders’ account of the material’s geological and cultural history, leavened with character sketches and stories gathered along the way.
‘Stone Country,’ the Land That Carved a People
In April the Washington Post did a gallery of Jeff Wolin’s Pigeon Hill photos, a then and now series spanning twenty years.
In Sight Perspective: See what 20 years did to the impoverished residents of Pigeon Hill
For good measure, WFHB dips into the archives to share another “then”: a 2013 interview that Interchange host Doug Storm did with Jeff Wolin for the short-lived series, The Custom House.
Jeffrey Wolin mixes the word with the image to produce portraits that seem to stand as much as social and cultural commentary as they do Art and appear to turn the very subject of that portrait into commentary as well. Wolin’s recent books consist of portrait series that included Holocaust survivors (Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust) and Vietnam War Veterans (Inconvenient Stories). He’s currently working on a series of portraits depicting Bloomington, Indiana residents from a section of the town called Pigeon Hill across a twenty-year span.
The Custom House was produced by Doug Storm and mixed by Jonathan Richardson.
