Malvika Jolly

photograph by Sabine Ostinvil

Interview by Yosan Alemu

Describe your series Voices of Pullman.

The photographs that are in exhibition in the Lewisohn building this year are part of a broader project on the community of Pullman, in Chicago’s South Side, where I lived until I moved to New York to come to school here. All of those photographs feel like an anomaly to me— there are hundreds of them, made at breakneck pace over the course of about six weeks— during that time I was working on them constantly and with a kind of urgency.

In that case, my process was informed by the broader framework of the project I was working on with my friend Faith McGlothlin, who was collecting oral histories and conducting interviews at the same time as I was making photographs. It was a really pragmatic way to work, actually: I shot portraits of her interview-subjects and other neighbors and scenes from their everyday lives. I photographed everyone we were hanging around with in between, and neighborhood scenes, and parts of community life we were in or around. The logistics expanded out from there. It was the dead of summer— so there were a lot of porch haircuts, family scenes, children at mischief, our neighbor’s bicycle repair-shop. The whole thing felt very in line with a tradition of American street photography of the sixties and seventies— just chance encounters in public spaces. Except the public space was very, very small and everyone knew everyone else, which leads entirely different kinds of encounters. Now that I am revisiting this work I also see the impact of a compressed time: of leaving a place I will not move back.