guggenheim fellowship

Jon Lowenstein has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Photography to allow him to pursue his long-term project on the South Side of Chicago, USA. More than 3000 people applied for the annual award which has formerly been awarded to iconic photographers such as Edward Weston, Mary Ellen Mark, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Wayne Miller, who won consecutive Fellowships from 1946-48 to document Chicago’s South Side.

For the past decade, Lowenstein has been interacting with and documenting life on Chicago’s South Side in a variety of capacities, including helping to publish Our Streets, a community newspaper, teach photography to middle school children and coach basketball. He will continue to expand his explorations into a participatory media project including a book and experimental film. (click here to view the Polaroid's feature).

south side

Today, the South Side of Chicago is shifting proverbially beneath the feet of its residents and has given birth to a host of vital questions: What is a people’s attachment to place? What is an old space when its’ faces change, its structures shift, neighborhoods are destroyed while others are born? In 2010, Chicago’s South Side trembles on the precipice of what was, what is and what will be.

As a long-time Chicago South Side resident Jon Lowenstein seeks to transcend the traditional depictions of a sullied urban milieu. He has spent the past decade documenting the South Side’s living soul, capturing its vibrant vicissitudes on film.  He exposes the gazing critical eye to the history of the South Side by offering a vital means of observing a city whose people are alive and powerful, to the extent that he lives amongst and creates from these shifting surroundings.

Lowenstein accomplishes these aesthetic objectives through engagement: entering into communities, interviewing and sharing moments with resident citizens and then writing in the lyrical voice of the South Side and capturing experiences on Polaroid instant film. The photographs are accompanied by extensive oral histories from South Side residents and a personal narrative crafted from my diaries and reflections through this land. What emerges is an embattled yet exuberant community, existing both in the present and as a living embodiment of an earlier moment, survivors of a dismantled industrial model, and bearers of an all new cultural flame that smolders with untold potentiality. The purpose of this project is to create a participatory media project that will be made into a book and a collaborative film examining this unique and ever-evolving place.