Jon Lowenstein

Lowenstein has spent the past two decades engaged in two large-scale documentary projects—one focusing on his adopted community on Chicago's South Side and the other documenting the experience of undocumented Latin Americans coming to and living in the United States.

South Side is a body of work encompassing photography, film, found ephemera, archival material and mixed-media art evoking a uniquely American time and place. Having lived on the South Side of Chicago for two decades, run a community newspaper and taught in neighborhood public schools, Lowenstein's project functions as a participatory media project seeking to engage both the immediate community and a larger audience. It is a collaborative effort challenging accepted notions of community, poverty, segregation, power, and hope.[3]

Shadow Lives USA follows the migrant trail from Central America, through Mexico and the United States in an effort to tell the stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history. Lowenstein has accompanied migrants on each part of their journey north, swimming the Rio Grande, crossing the border with them, and later documenting individual family lives in America. Shadow Lives is meant to spur dialogue around the immigrant experience, the dangers of border crossings, living undocumented in the United States, and deportation. James Estrin, writing in The New York Times, said "While Mr. Lowenstein is hardly the only photographer to cover Mexican and Central American migration, few have done it as comprehensively over such an extended period of time."[2]

In July 2019, Lowenstein gave his first TEDSummit speech in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the speech, Lowenstein outlined his work for the past 20 years, expounding upon his career as a photographer. He showed his documentation of the migrant journey from Latin America to the United states, and gave insight to his decade-long project, "Shadow Lives USA". The project documents the "inner worlds of families escaping poverty and violence in Central America -- and pieces together the complex reasons people leave their homes in search of a better life".[4] "Shadow Lives USA" will be released in 2020.