Janine Wiedel

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 2001 and 2005 Wiedel documented the lives of the multicultural community in St Agnes Place, a 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 and 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 Profile Intermedia 9 conference called The Tower of Babel at the Power House, Bremen, Germany.

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 and opened by Humphrey Spender in 1992. The exhibition then travelled with a British Council visual arts grant to the Goodnow Gallery in Sudbury, Massachusetts, USA in 1994.

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 (1991) and her solo exhibition Dover and its People: Janine Wiedel (1991) at the Dover Museum and the County Hall Gallery in Maidstone was the result of her work in Dover. Wiedel spent a year documenting life in Dover and the changes the Channel Tunnel would bring to the people and their culture with the series capturing two juxtaposing ways of life in the town.

Wiedel photographed the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp from 1983 to 1984. In the same year that US cruise missiles arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, Wiedel first visited the camp, which was a centre for peace and anti-nuclear movements and also became an internationally renowned symbol of the women's movement. She spent the next two years photographing and interviewing the women who lived there. Her work documents the lives and resistance of the women at the camp, which was made up of makeshift dwellings alongside the perimeter fence of the base.

Wiedel's exhibition Vulcan's Forge, originally shown at The Photographers' Gallery in London in 1979, returned to the West Midlands in November 2021. She wanted to invoke memories and revisit the images of how people worked and what their workplaces were like in the late 1970s. The exhibition was recreated at The Hive in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham from November 2021 to January 2022. This follow-up project included an appeal on local news to the people of Stoke-on-Trent to help find those who appeared in the photographs. As a result, Birmingham author Andy Conway was reunited with Wiedel who had photographed him as a schoolboy waiting at a factory gate 45 years previously.

This resulted in an Arts Council sponsored book Vulcan's Forge (1979) 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 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 audio visual material as well as the video tape 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 the publication Tribune.

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 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 workers.

Between 1977 and 1979 Wiedel and Rob Walker collaborated on a research study in a London secondary school. The project was supported by The Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia. The study involved photographer and researcher working closely in selected classrooms photographing, interviewing, analysing and exhibiting the results along with feedback from students and teachers. The study was published in Field Methods in the Study of Education edited by Robert G Burgess. Wiedel's photographic contributions appear in chapter 10 'Using Photographs in a Discipline of Words'.

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).

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 called Looking at Iran, .mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:"\"""\"""'""'"}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right{padding-right:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflink{font-weight:inherit}ISBN 9780397317974. At a time of political unrest in Iran, Weidel photographed the lives of the people of Tehran.

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.

In 1973 Wiedel spent three weeks living with the Inuit 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 (1976), (a later update of this book was produced as an ibook in 2013 entitled 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 on / contributed photography to the film Traveller (1997).

Classroom interaction was also one of her ongoing projects in the 1970s and 1980s. Wiedel was commissioned by TES (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.

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 Berkley which emerged organically from Wiedel's observational style of photography 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 Cafe Royal Books - see the Zines by Wiedel section below.

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. Throughout her career, she has undertaken freelance commissions and taught in Universities and Art & Design Colleges as a part-time visiting lecturer.

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 then moved to Britain in 1970 to study photography at the Guildford School of Photography from 1970 to 1973. 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.

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 she spent two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain. Wiedel's work is socially minded, exploring themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counter culture movements.