Janine Wiedel is a documentary photographer and visual anthropologist who has been living in the UK since 1970. She began photographing in San Francisco in the late 1960s covering the Berkeley Riots and the Black Panther Movement. Her work explores themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counterculture movements. Her decades of social documentary photography have fed into her extensive archive and photo library.
Alongside freelance work, Janine has always undertaken long-term projects which have become major studies, books and exhibitions. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally and is held in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Martin Parr Foundation. Between 2017-2022 Wiedel has published seventeen zines with Café Royal Books.
In 1977, Wiedel was the first photographer to be awarded the West Midlands Major Arts Bursary. She spent two years documenting the area’s rapidly disappearing industries. Vulcan’s Forge was first exhibited as a groundbreaking installation exhibition at The Photographer’s Gallery, London in 1979. Forty years on it was revisited as an exhibition at Hive Gallery, Birmingham (2019) and published by Bluecoat Press as a hardback book Vulcans Forge in 2024.
In the early 1980s Wiedel spent two years documenting the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. In 2025, Life at the Fence was published by Image&Reality.
In 1989 Wiedel was awarded a one-year commission from The Cross Channel Photographic Mission to document the town of Dover in the run up to the construction of the Channel Tunnel (book and exhibition: A Port in a Storm). In 1990, The Gainsborough House Museum commissioned her and writer June Freedman to spend a year photographing and recording the people of Sudbury (Exhibition and book ‘Faces with Voices’)
Recent projects have included: a study of the Rastafarian Community (presented as a multi-screen production in Bremen, Germany); a project on refugee camps in Northern France (touring exhibition); a four-year documentation of St Agnes Place Squat (to be published by RRB in 2026); and ongoing studies of protest movements and London’s multicultural communities.
