Slave forts in Ghana. A Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
Chicago native Jane Fulton Alt has taken her photography around the world to address “universal issues of how we treat one another.”
The artist, who moved to Evanston 30 years ago, said she uses her photographs as metaphors, drawing on her background as a clinical social worker.
“You are just more aware of life cycles and what the essence is of being human, and I think I got part of that out of my social work practice,” she said. “That’s what I bring to the photography.”
While working part-time at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Alt began taking classes at the Evanston Art Center.
“I used to think (photography) was just for obsessive-compulsive people with the darkroom and getting the print just right,” she said. “I didn’t really understand it.”
Alt attributed her interest in the medium to Dick Olderman, her former teacher at the Evanston Art Center.
Olderman, who called Alt’s work “introspective,” said her photographs are “showing what she finds of concern in the world.”
Alt, who still practices clinical social work, photographed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when she traveled to New Orleans as part of a team of mental health professionals.
“I had no intention of photographing,” she said. “But after being there for three days, it was just so horrific, and I felt so devastated.”
Her book “Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward” came out of this project and will be published in 2009.
“That was really the first time I merged the social work with the photography,” Alt said.
Her series “Mourning Light” also evolved from a concern for “how man treats man and the choices we make.”
The project began in Poland during her visit to Auschwitz when she stepped inside the concentration camp’s gas chamber.
“I just felt like I had to find some kind of light coming in through the darkness,” she said. “I ended up spending a couple of hours photographing every nook and cranny of that room trying to find the light.”
While looking at themes of birth and death, Alt wanted to photograph in a slaughterhouse but had a hard time getting into one in Chicago. She ended up going to Louisiana where she saw pigs being butchered.
“Matters of the Heart,” a series of portraits with a religious theme, came from the experience.
“I ended up taking the pig’s heart as a substitute for the human heart,” she said.
One of the pieces in the series is a self-portrait of Alt holding the pig’s heart against her chest.
Deann Bayless, who displays Alt’s photographs in her Chicago restaurant, said Alt has “a fearlessness to look at really hard subjects.”
“She explores the world through her eyes,” Bayless said. “She’s not afraid to go anywhere in her exploration.”
