Penny Wolin


Penny Wolin, also known as Penny Diane Wolin and Penny Wolin-Semple, is an American portrait photographer and a visual anthropologist. She has exhibited solo at the Smithsonian Institution and is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and one grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is held in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Layton Art Collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the American Art Museum, administered by the Smithsonian Institution. Known for her documentary and conceptual photographs, she has completed commissions for major corporations, national magazines and private collectors. For over 30 years, she has used photographic portraiture with oral interviews to research Jewish civilization in America.

Youth and education

Wolin is the youngest of five children born into a Conservadox Jewish family in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Her father, Morris Aaron Wolin immigrated there as a child, directly from the Russian town of Grodno, later to become a businessman. Her mother, Helen Sobol Wolin, came from Denver, Colorado, and was an artist. At age 10, Penny began using a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. At age 16, her brother Michael Wolin gave her a high quality rangefinder camera and the necessary darkroom equipment to begin a career.
Wolin attended the University of Wyoming and then was graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, majoring in photography and film. She also attended a masters' program in the department of cultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the mentorship of Cultural Anthropologist Johannes Wilbert. Then she was awarded a directing fellowship to the American Film Institute, Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies.

Major projects

Descendants of Light: American Photographers of Jewish Ancestry

In 2005, Wolin began researching Descendants of Light: American Photographers of Jewish Ancestry. Since the 1850s, these photographers have contributed significantly to the fields of journalistic, fashion, portrait, advertising and fine art photography. By photographing and interviewing each photographer, re-photographing heirloom images of their ancestors and showcasing an iconic image that is of their own creation, Wolin is able to visually and verbally document a multi-generational story of the intersection between American Jewish culture, modern America and the history and practice of photography. The book is now available and the large gelatin-silver prints are being prepared as a traveling exhibition. Penny photographed and interviewed more than 70 of the leading and most original Jewish-American photographers in history, including Lillian Bassman, Jo Ann Callis, Lauren Greenfield, Elinor Carucci, Lois Greenfield, Bruce Davidson, Annie Leibovitz, Herman Leonard, Helen Levitt, Jay Maisel, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, Robert Frank and Joel-Peter Witkin. Posthumous interviews include the families of Philippe Halsman, Herb Ritts, Nickolas Muray, Arthur Rothstein, Roman Vishniac and Garry Winogrand. Alan Trachtenberg, Ph.D., Yale University has written the introductory essay entitled The Claim of a Jewish Eye. This documentary work was partially funded by crowd-sourced funding from and is now published by , Cheyenne, Wyoming © 2015.

The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of the Diaspora

In 1982 Wolin met the late Shirley Burden, the major donor to the photography department of The Museum of Modern Art. With his encouragement and financial assistance as well as that of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants, as administered through the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, Wolin completed a visual and verbal study of 140 years and five generations of Jewish culture in Wyoming. The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of The Diaspora was sponsored by what is now known as the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, California, and exhibited solo at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, National Museum of American Jewish History, Judah L. Magnes Museum and Ucross Foundation. A book of the same title is published by , Cheyenne, Wyoming © 2000.

Jackalopes, Cowboys and Coalmines: A Photographic Survey of Wyoming

In 1978, Wolin was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts major survey grant to complete Jackalopes, Cowboys and Coalmines: A Photographic Survey of Wyoming. Because of Wyoming's mineral and oil-rich natural resources, the state's history had been one of a boom or bust economy and culture. A national energy crisis made for a huge energy boom in Wolin's native state. This energy boom brought a final "Americanization" to the rural towns that sparsely dotted the least populated state in the union. Shopping malls and fast food outlets arrived; local downtown businesses closed, and the existing ranch economy was in turmoil. A worker's wage to tend cattle was no match for the higher wages being paid to work in an open pit coal mine or a drilling rig. Traveling during each season throughout Wyoming, Wolin photographed and interviewed the native and newly arriving residents, ranging from cowboys to oilfield roughnecks to elected officials. The resulting work became a traveling exhibition that toured Wyoming as sponsored by then Governor Ed Herschler. The photographs and text are now held in the permanent collection of the Wyoming State Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, American Art Museum.

Guest Register

In 1975, while still at Art Center College of Design, Wolin created Guest Register, an important body of work consisting of 32 photographs with excerpted interviews that documented the residents of each room in the St. Francis Hotel in Hollywood, California. The hotel was located on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue and sheltered a range of people that stayed there anywhere from one night to thirty years. Their connection to one another was simply that they had come to Hollywood to pursue a dream. This opus piece set up a working style of text and image and brought her to the attention of a number of graphic designers, museums and collectors. At that time, Bob Cato at A&M Records commissioned Wolin to photograph the rock group The Band; Lloyd Ziff, Art Director of New West magazine in Los Angeles, commissioned her to photograph Ansel Adams and George Burns; Los Angeles County Museum of Art invited her to participate in a group exhibition; and Marvin Israel, a highly regarded graphic designer working in New York, began designing Guest Register for publication by Aperture Books. Aperture subsequently withdrew from the publication and the work remains unpublished.

Selected reviews