There goes the neighborhood – Artist Mercedes Jelinek builds community one photo at a time

You know the whales. Those sublimely preppy ones swimming on the ties, handbags, even pants. Mercedes Jelinek worked with those in a Vineyard Vines belt factory. She’s been a florist, too, and served tables and drinks in countless restaurants and bars in Connecticut, Vermont, New York, even Hawaii, from where she called her father to inform him she had moved.

“Random jobs,” she says. “I want to try everything.”

Since the Rhode Island native turned 17, she’s lived on her own, always seeking whatever is novel and bright and breathless.

But she never gained a true community among strangers until she moved to Baton Rouge and announced she was giving something precious away.

Outside her house on West Roosevelt north of LSU in Old South Baton Rouge, Jelinek painted a sign and posted it for passersby.

“Free Photographs for Neighborhood Picture Project,” it read.

One by one, this welcoming act of artwork attracted a litany of curious characters from the surrounding blocks.

What are you doing with these pictures? Are you a cop?

They might as well have asked the recent LSU MFA graduate if they were taking part in a graduate school art project or a sociological experiment. The answer would have been yes to both.

Inspired by the portraiture of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and August Sander, and the contemporary work of Alec Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi collection, Jelinek’s Neighborhood Photo Booth Project was born out of the same dissonant frustration held by others in what is too often the backyard community of Baton Rouge.

“I felt completely out of place,” she says of moving to the Deep South for the first time.

The photographer wanted to connect with the people she saw only from a distance, and her camera was the tool to bridge this gap.

The daughter of two dentists, Jelinek is well aware of the class difference between her and the majority of her subjects. It is to her credit that these working-class Baton Rougeans do not look exploited in her images. They look proud.

A black, aging house painter splattered in white and speaking wisdom with his eyes; a young girl getting her hair done; a mustached scrapper waving his meaty dukes; a mother and daughter tenderly leaning their heads together; nearly identical steely-gazed brothers—one a model, the other a soldier sent to Afghanistan.

The perception of Old South Baton Rouge may be unwelcoming, even deadly at times, but Jelinek hopes her images prove otherwise.

Shooting on film with no digital manipulation, she built her thesis subject, earned her degree and was accepted into Art Melt. She has since moved to the outskirts of the Garden District, but her neighborhood portraits continue for the same reason they began.

“I like the interaction a lot,” she says. “It’s an amazing rush—a wonderful feeling, making something that represents this moment between people.”

Jon Jones is an avid deer and duck hunter who lives near Jelinek and worked with her at Enoteca Marcello Wine Bar and Café before it was sold.

Suited up in camouflage and waders, Jones brought a shotgun to his portrait session and chomped a cigar—his duck blind ritual.

At first nervous to pose, Jones says the shoot turned quickly into a laid-back conversation. Jelinek’s images captured his personality, he says, and perhaps in some unexpected way, offered a sense of belonging to something larger than himself, an uncharted connection with new faces and untold stories.

“[The Neighborhood photos] are great because they show people from all walks of life,” Jones says. “You look at these pictures and think, ‘What has this person been through?’”

Jelinek asks a lot of questions when photographing a subject—like a new acquaintance at a party might—but in the process of learning about her neighbors, she has discovered just as much about herself. How to listen. How to not only take inspiration, but to give it—she made black-and-white prints for everyone she photographed. How much she wants to never quit taking pictures.

But where? Is she itching for something new?

“Growing up, I was always the kind of girl who said, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’” says Jelinek, who worked this summer with photographer Lane Coder, a Vogue and New York Times veteran. “I’m just not the type of person to stay anywhere really long. But I really don’t want to leave now. I’m comfortable here. Now, I know all my neighbors.” mercedesjelinekphotography.com