Janine Wiedel


Janine Wiedel is an documentary photographer and visual anthropologist. She was born in New York city, has been based in the UK since 1970 and lives in London. Since the late 1960s she has been working on major projects that have become books and exhibitions. In the early 1970s she spent five years working on a project about Irish Travellers. In the late 1970s she spent two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain.
Wiedel's books include Irish Tinkers, Looking at Iran, Vulcan's Forge, Dover, a Port in a Storm and Faces with Voices.
She had solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1974 and 1979. Associated Television broadcast a TV documentary about her called A Camera in the Street. She has won British Life Photography awards in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Life and work

Having completed two years of an architecture degree at the University of Colorado, where she was virtually the only female enrolled on the course, Wiedel switched to studying fine art and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as workshops with Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall in the late 1960s. She then moved to Britain in 1970 to study photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Guildford from 1970 to 1973.
While in San Francisco, she photographed the 1960s Berkeley protests and the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. Ansel Adams had a great influence on Wiedel's approach to photography, as did Thurston Hopkins who she studied under at the Guildford School of Art.
In 1973 Wiedel spent three weeks living with the Inuit people of Pangnirtung on the East coast of Baffin Island in Canada's North-West Territories. She subsequently published her experience and photographs in the New Humanist magazine in 1974 and the Times Educational Supplement in 1978.
In the early 1970s she spent five years photographing Irish Travellers, resulting in the book Irish Tinkers, and an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1974. She was a photographer on / contributed photography to the film Traveller.
In 1976 Wiedel was commissioned by the publishers A & C Black and Lippincott, with support from the National Iranian oil company, to produce a children's educational book called Looking at Iran,.
In 1977 Wiedel was the first photographer to win the West Midlands Arts major bursary by photographing and documenting the lives of people in the West Midlands. For a period of around two years in the late 1970s, Wiedel lived in her Volkswagen van in the Birmingham area photographing a range of people and industries, including miners, chain-makers, steel workers, jewellers and pottery worker This resulted in an Arts Council sponsored book Vulcan's Forge and an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1979. A TV programme linked to the project, called England their England: Camera in the Streets, was shown on ATV at 7.30 pm on Tuesday 9th May 1978 and reviewed by Keith Brace in the Birmingham Daily Post.
She photographed the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp from 1983 to 1984.
In 1989 Wiedel won the South Eastern Arts Cross Channel Photographic Award. This was a one year commission to photograph the town of Dover before the completion of the Channel Tunnel. Her book Dover: A Port in a Storm and her solo exhibition Dover and its People: Janine Wiedel at the Dover Museum and the County Hall Gallery in Maidstone was the result of work in Dover.
In 1991 she was awarded a one year commission from the Gainsborough's House Museum to document the people of Sudbury in England. Her book on the subject, Faces with Voices, was published in 1992 and the exhibition Faces with Voices: Portraits from an English Community was shown at Gainsborough's House, Sudbury in 1992. The exhibition then travelled with a British Council visual arts grant to the Goodnow Gallery in Sudbury, Massachusetts, USA.
Between 2001 and 2005 Wiedel documented the lives of the multicultural community in St Agnes Place, a notorious squatted street in South London. In 2005 two hundred riot police evicted the occupants from 21 of the houses, leaving 150 homeless. Wiedel's photographs are a lasting record of their lives, stories and eventual eviction. Between 2002-2006 Wiedel photographed the Rastafarian and BAME community in London which included a food growing and food awareness programme in Brixton. The food awareness programme was funded by London 21 and the Scarman Trust. In 2006 Wiedel co-ordinated and organised a talk, Groundation concert and multiscreen photographic presentation of the London Rastafarian community for the :de:Profile_Intermedia|Profile Intermedia 9 conference called The Tower of Babel at the Power House, Bremen, Germany.
In 2016 Wiedel spent six months photographing in the Calais Jungle and the Grande-Synthe refugee camp in Dunkirk resulting in an exhibition In Transit: Life in the Refugee Camps of Northern France.
Between 2014 and 2017 Wiedel has received multiple awards and commendations from the British life Photography Awards in both the Historic Britain and Life at Work categories.
Ongoing projects. From 1968 to the present Wiedel has been documenting protest, protest movements and multicultural communities. In 1974 Wiedel established a photo library which continues to be updated. Since 2003 the collection has been in the process of digitisation.

Publications

Books by Wiedel

Solo exhibitions

Wiedel's work is held in the following public collections: