Janine Wiedel (born 1947) is a 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 projects which have become books and exhibitions. In the early 1970s she spent five years working on a project about Irish Travellers; in the late 1970s two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain. Wiedel's work is socially minded, exploring themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counterculture movements.
Wiedel's books include Irish Tinkers (1976), Looking at Iran (1976), Vulcan's Forge (1979), Dover, a Port in a Storm (1991) and Faces with Voices (1992).
She had solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1974 and 1979. Associated Television broadcast a TV documentary about her titled 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
Early career
Having completed two years of an architecture degree at the University of Colorado, where there were few women 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 moved to Britain in 1970 to study photography at the Guildford School of Art from 1970 to 1973. 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.
While in San Francisco, she photographed the Berkeley People's Park protest and riots in 1969. Her photographs contrasted idyllic scenes of community gardening with images of the police and the National Guard occupying Berkeley which emerged from Wiedel's observational style and were put into sharp relief through her editing. Wiedel also photographed the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. The resulting photographs have been published by Café Royal Books (see below).
1970s
In 1973 Wiedel spent three weeks living with the Inuit of Pangnirtung on the East coast of Baffin Island in Canada's Northwest 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 (1976, updated in 2013 as an ibook titled Irish Tinkers: A portrait of Irish Travellers in the 1970s) and an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1974. She was a photographer for the film Traveller (1997).
In 1976 Wiedel was commissioned by the publishers A & C Black (UK) and Lippincott (USA), with support from the National Iranian Oil Company, to produce a children's educational book, Looking at Iran, . At a time of political unrest in Iran, Wiedel photographed the lives of the people of Tehran.
Classroom interaction was also one of her ongoing projects in the 1970s and 1980s. Wiedel was commissioned by the Times Educational Supplement, Penguin Education and other educational publishers. She provided the photographs for the book A Guide to Classroom Observation by Rob Walker and Clem Adelman in 1975. This book was published in eReader format in 2005. The classroom photographs have been archived by Four Corners Archive.
In 1977 Wiedel was the first photographer to win the West Midlands Arts major bursary. She photographed and documented the lives of people in the West Midlands. For 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 workers.
This resulted in an Arts Council–sponsored book Vulcan's Forge (1979) and an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1979. A related TV programme, England their England: Camera in the Streets, was shown on ATV at 7.30 pm on Tuesday 9 May 1978 and reviewed by Keith Brace in the Birmingham Daily Post. The exhibition was laid out to try to give an impression of the working conditions and the atmosphere of the area. Instead of rows of uniformly sized photographs, there were sections devoted to different industries, some special lighting and audiovisual material as well as the videotape of the ATV programme. Vulcan's Forge was exhibited again in its entirety in 2021 at The Hive in Birmingham and reviewed by Josh Allen in Tribune.