Jane Evelyn Atwood was born in New York in 1947 and grew up between Tennessee, Illinois and Massachusetts. In 1970, she graduated in theatre from Bard college. The summer of the next year she left the states to visit Europe. Without any precise plan for the future, she decided to stay in France where she has lived since that time. In Paris she found a job as a baby sitter, but she realized she was deeply unhappy so she looked for an English speaking therapist. Through his help she unblocked her huge creative potential.
Photography didn’t belong in her family background, she discovered it thanks to the work of Diane Arbus who became a strong influence in Atwood’s work. Atwood visited one of Arbus's exhibtions in the states with her sister. The reason why she decided to go there wasn't anything to do with her photographs but rather because Diane Arbus had just committed suicide and in Atwood’s family someone did the same. She was obsessed with it. The exhibition was a real fascination for her, she became immediately conquered by the people portrayed through Arbus's lens.
In 1976, she bought her first camera and forced herself to overcome her shyness, speaking with people and taking pictures of them. One evening a woman told her she knew a prostitute and took her to a brothel located at 19 rue des Lombards, in the centre of Paris. In France, prostitution is tolerated and at that time prostitutes were also allowed to stand in the streets. Atwood became completely fascinated by these women and their life and decided to take portraits of them. She wrote a letter to Blondine, one of the prostitute she met in the brothel, she immediately accepted her request to be photographed and invited Atwood to visit her during her working hours in the streets, from eight in the evening untill the early morning of the day after. Blondine was the only prostitute in the brothel who didn't have a pimp, for that reason Atwood could become very close with her. Blondine slowly introduced Atwood to the secret and forbidden world of the Paris red light distict.
Jane Evelyn Atwood
© Jane Evelyn Atwood
Atwood said it was in that building where she learned everything about photography: how to use the light and work when it’s missing, to be patient, to understand when it is the right moment to take a picture and when is the wrong one and to rely on her own instincts.
The photographer followed Blondine every single night, documenting her life for an entire year. At the end of it, Atwood produced her first photographic project Rue des Lombards 1976-1977 which is now exhibited at the L. Parker Stephenson Photography Gallery in Manhattan with another series called Pigalle people 1978-1979, which is about trans prostitutes in Pigalle.
Later, in 1980, she met the Mangum photographer Leonard Freed who encouraged her to make a photo book of her work , he told her that had never seen anyone so close to women as she was and suggested her to go deeper into this subject in documenting the life of these women with her clients. Atwood edited her first photo book Daily Night Life which was republished in 2010 as Rue des Lombards. According to Atwood these series are among her best works for this unique freshness that you only own when you are unexperienced and naive and you approach every subject with excitement and audacity.
In the 1980s, Atwood received the first W. Eugene Smith Grant for humanistic photography for a project started in 1977, concerning the lives of blind children. In 1987 she won the World Press Photo Foundation Prize for documenting the life and death of a man affected with AIDS.
Jane Evelyn Atwood
© Jane Evelyn Atwood
All along her career Atwood has been attracted to closed worlds : lives and universes that are apart from common reality, living on the edge of mainstream culture and which most of people do not know about or choose to ignore. She defined her approach to photography as an obsession. In fact, her research on a chosen subject can even lasts for years, until the moment she feels she had totally explored the topic in depth. Atwood leaves her subjects speaking for themselves, often starting a project with intimate interviews with the people she photographs and ending up combining their words with the pictures she took of them . Her visceral, heart touching documentary work has obtained multiple grants , honors and publications, included a monography in the prestigious series Photo Poche (Actes Sud).