Jeff Wolin: Ancient Provence, Layers of History in Southern France
and Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust
April 17 - May 31, 2003
Artists's Reception Thursday, April 17, 2003 6 - 8 pm

The June Bateman Fine Art is pleased to announce a two part exhibition of the work of Jeffrey Wolin.

The main exhibition space of the gallery will be devoted to showing thirty one gold and selenium toned prints from Mr. Wolin's most recent photographic series, Ancient Provence: Layers of History in Southern France. The "Layers of history" in the show's title describes the play between the ancient and the modern in the region of Southern France known as Provence whereby Mr. Wolin, rather than attempting to romanticize the environment by suppressing indications of the modern world, includes sharp, yet somehow not entirely incongruous juxtapositions between ancient structures and aspects of Southern France's modern commercial, industrial, and touristic life.

In Aqueduct with Hair Salon, South of Lyon, for instance, we see the colossal arch of an ancient Roman aqueduct abutting a rather nondescript beauty parlor while straddling a modern day intersection complete with painted crosswalk and a modern traffic light. Hotel l'Arena. Frejus shows us an ancient pillar standing, seemingly surrounded by the jostle of bright tables and umbrellas of an outdoor cafe. Humorous juxtapositions and ironic commentary notwithstanding, in Ancient Provence: Layers of History in Southern France, Jeffrey Wolin presents an extraordinary portrait of a very old and beautiful land in photographic portraits of exceptional compositional clarity and tones that recall the prints of nineteenth century photographic masters Frederick Evans, Edouard Baldus and Eugene Atget.

A catalog has been prepared and published in conjunction with the exhibit. Ancient Provence: Layers of History in Southern France (2003), features an introduction by art historian George Dimock, and is available through the June Bateman Fine Art. Ancient Provence: Layers of History in Southern France has three exhibition venues. It is currently on view at the Galerie de l'Abbaye de Montmajour in Arles, France. Following its run at the June Bateman Fine Art in New York, a selection of photographs from the series will be exhibited in fall of 2003 at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.

Ten images from Wolin's extraordinary series Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust will be on view in gallery room three, marking the first time this work has been shown in a commercial gallery in New York. Published in book form by Chronicle Books in 1997, the series began in the early 1990s, when Wolin made a series of clear, straightforward environmental portraits of Jewish Holocaust survivors and placed them in relation to a superimposed text taken from videotaped interviews conducted with his subjects. Although the photographs bear the weight of one of the most significant and tragic of modern historical events, both the photographs and the texts attend closely to the personal dimension of this history. It is the precisely the ordinariness of these people who have lived through extraordinary brutality that makes these photographic works so compelling. This layering is especially revealed in several portraits in which the subjects hold prewar snapshots, suggesting both the continuity and great distance that must exist between their current and youthful selves and worlds.

"Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust" was presented as a traveling exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, The International Center for Photography, New York, The Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Virginia), The Indianapolis Museum of Art, and The Haus Bill (Zurich, Switzerland). A selection of the works from this exhibit was also presented in Paris, Wintherthur, Switzerland, Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Barcelona.

Jeffrey Wolin is the Ruth A. Halls Professor of Photography at the Indiana University School of Fine Arts. He has received two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and held a five-month U.S./France Fellowship at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Mr. Wolin's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the George Eastman House, the Center for Creative Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and many other museums and galleries. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the New York Public Library, the George Eastman House, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris France, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mr. Wolin's work has been published in 12 monographs and books, including Ancient Provence (2003) and Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust (1997). His work has also been published in The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and other periodicals.