BIOGRAPHY
Penny Wolin’s first professional photography assignment was at age 16, to cover the world’s largest man against beast affair, the rodeo at Cheyenne Frontier Days. She then moved to Los Angeles where she trained at ArtCenter College of Design, UCLA Department of Anthropology and the American Film Institute. She is the recipient of grants from the NEA and NEH, and has created wry and insightful documentary and editorial portraits for national magazines such as, LIFE, Vanity Fair and Playboy; corporations such as Peter Michael Winery, Charles Schultz Museum and Wolfgang Puck Food Company; and private commissions, including the Brant Foundation and the Peter Michael Family.
Parallel to her education and commercial experience, Wolin uses a camera and tape recorder to document varying cultures in the United States. GUEST REGISTER, an early and formative body of work consisting of 34 photographs with excerpted interviews, documents the residents of selected rooms in the St. Francis Hotel in Hollywood, California. Whether the resident of each room stayed for a night or a decade, the tenant reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the human condition. The publication of this work was reviewed by the New York Times as, “… we find warmth and invitation, a genuine sweetness in the presence of her subjects, who include a Vietnam veteran, a retired set designer, a former child actor, an ex-rodeo rider and just about every other sort of person in between. What makes “GUEST REGISTER” so remarkable is not just its gentle spirit, nor even its democratic reach, but rather the expansiveness that grows out of these things together.
Her project, Jackalopes, Cowboys and Coalmines examines the changing culture of the cowboy in the midst of a full-scale energy development boom. This work is held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and continues as a relevant view of the destructive nature of the world’s fossil fuel economy.
The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of the Diaspora, has exhibited solo at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, The Judah L. Magnes Museum and The National Museum of Jewish History. Faced with a world who seemed to disbelieve that immigrant Jews were instrumental in settlinge the America West. Wolin documents the Jewish presence in Wyoming. The book of the same title is published by Crazy Woman Creek Press (©2000.) This work was hailed by Gregory Rodriquez of the Los Angeles Times as “telling the more complex story of adaptation and evolution. Wolin, spent 15 years putting together this triumphant epic of the 140 year history of Jews in the Cowboy State.”
In 2016, Crazy Woman Creek Press, with partial funding from a Kickstarter campaign, published Wolin’s multi-generational documentary, Descendants of Light: American Photographers of Jewish Ancestry. Over an eight-year period, Wolin relentlessly photographed and interviewed 70 American Jewish photographers, with an eye toward understanding their ancestral history and how this effected their artistic motivations to tell stories with photography. Through her collaboration with these artists, they discover issues of Jewish survival, ancestral memory, mysticism and the meaning of observance in any form.
Reviewed by Weston Naef, Curator Emeritus and Founding Curator of The J. Paul Getty Museum Department of Photographs; “Wolin’s desire to interview Jewish photographers with a view to ascertaining if their faith played a part in their art is an interesting line of inquiry. It will surely contribute new insight to the history of photography.”
When not drawn to the questioning peripatetic life, Penny divides her time between a small farm in Northern California, and Los Angeles, the most culturally interesting city on the planet.