“We’re out at the lake having a good time when this white dude pulls his dick out in the middle of the parking lot, starts to take a leak. So I walk up to him. Hey man, I say, could you pee in the woods? There’s women and kids here and you’re in plain sight.”
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Wolin worked as a police photographer in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the mid-70s. “It was a real eye-opening, rich experience,” he says. When not shooting arson scenes, mug shots, or good citizens of the month, he would read the case reports the cops wrote up.
Wolin sees himself as both a writer and a photographer. The texts he composes to go on top of his prints aspire to literary reportage, transcending the role of mere captions. He looks to medieval illuminated manuscripts and contemporary African American folk art as models for blending words and pictures.
Wolin doesn’t name his ex-wife in Insanity (1991). “The last I heard of her, she was living in the streets of Washington, D.C. She had become a homeless person,” he writes. Before that, he says, she’d been hitchhiking along interstate highways. The image is a naked brain, hatched from someone’s skull and at rest on a smooth surface, perhaps after an autopsy or in a classroom. “In retrospect, I guess she didn’t go insane all at once,” Wolin writes.
Wolin’s oeuvre ponders how destiny gets etched in his subjects’ faces. As his art testifies, Wolin has been personally hit, more than once, with mystifying traumas that he inscribes in his photograph-stories. Insanity asks, “How does one explain the case of my ex-wife who went stark raving mad one day while we were married, as if some hidden switch in her head had been thrown?” It’s a shutter release, not a switch, that arrests Wolin’s subjects in moments anchored in their pasts. “Perfectly good people wind up in bad environments, and we never know what we’re doing next,” he says.
