jon LOWENSTEIN

A VIOLENT THREAD

For nearly a decade, Jon Lowenstein has lived on the South Side of Chicago, where, he says, “I am consistently impressed by the residents’ deep connection to their community, as well as by the deep impact of violence on the community.” Through photography and video, Lowenstein depicts the experience of living on the South Side. He recently produced an experimental film that, he says, “deals with the impact of social violence. While the violence directly affects young African-American and Latino men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six, the reality is that its reverberations cut across all ages and generations.”

THE LAST HARVEST

In the summer of 2022, Norvin made an excruciating but thrilling decision. After years of struggling to make ends meet for his family as a long-haul truck driver, life in his small rural town of La Maquina, Guatemala, had grown too lean. Gang violence and poverty were surging. So was chronic malnutrition, with more than 55% of children in rural Guatemala suffering from the condition. He wanted more for his young daughter and wife, more for the 10 members of his extended family who lived together in a few timber-framed houses with dirt floors and a shared kitchen and bathroom on a small plot of land. Norvin and the rest of the family had decided: He was going to embark on the migrant trail to the United States.

CENOTAPH 12

Cenotaph 12 is a multi-screen installation that documents the intersection of daily life, structural inequality, social violence and the legacy of history on the South Side of Chicago where I’ve lived and worked for almost two decades. The piece examines how these forces are reflected and refracted through my own lens, social media and the surveillance state and then consumed and re-played and transmitted over and over again. The film starts in a public, impersonal and structural phase and moves implicitly into the personal lives of a group of young men who have lived within this space for their entire lives.

THE ADVOCATE

Short film about activist Jedidiah Brown commissioned by Channel 4 in England.