Jordan Porter-Woodruff, the staff photographer at UChicago Medicine, never planned to be a visual artist.
When she graduated from Loyola University Chicago with an English degree 11 years ago, she had hopes of being a screenwriter.
But, as Porter-Woodruff told the Herald, she wanted the stability of a day job to support her interest in the arts.
“I’ve never wanted to be that person that was a starving artist, that’s never been my vibe,” she said.
And yet, just over a decade later, she opened her second solo photography exhibition at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave earlier this month. Running until May 18, Porter-Woodruff’s newest show, “Portraits: Working Hands,” focuses on the role of hands in sports, art and work.
Photography had been a part of her life from an early age. From kindergarten to third grade, Porter-Woodruff was a model for clothing, toys and commercials, and learned how to get comfortable in front of a camera.
“While doing that, I remember the specific conversation I had with a photographer. He said to me, ‘you take 100 photos to get that one photo.’ For some reason that truly stuck with me, and it’s kind of what has carried me through my current photography,” said Porter-Woodruff.
Porter-Woodruff hadn’t touched a camera until she began working at UChicago Medicine in January 2017. Her interest in health and fitness led her to the role. There, she wrote consumer friendly medical articles that made health and wellness issues accessible to the general public.
Her gravitation to medicine and health can be traced back to childhood. She grew up on the South Side, at 91st Street and Crandon Avenue. In the 1970s and 1980s, Porter-Woodruff explained, her neighborhood of Calumet Heights was dubbed “Pill Hill” due to the robust community of Black doctors, police officers and nurses who lived in the area. Porter-Woodruff’s grandmother was a nurse and her grandfather a police officer.
But after a while in her job at UChicago Medicine, she found herself getting antsy, and looked for ways to expand her role. She convinced her team to start an Instagram page for the hospital.
“And with that,” explained Porter-Woodruff, “they were like, ‘here’s this camera, go take pictures for it!’ It was not something I anticipated. But it literally started from there and has truly just snowballed.”
Now, Porter-Woodruff runs all of UChicago Medicine’s headshots, photographs surgeries and takes pictures of other hospital events for social media and press coverage.
Her work documenting medical procedures got Porter-Woodruff thinking about the connection between brains and hands.
“I realized that my job puts me in a lot of really unique situations that a lot of people will never get to see,” she said. “I have photographed groundbreaking surgeries where they put some electrodes in this guy’s brain so he could use a prosthetic arm.”
“I’m surrounded by these very important people, I’m taking pictures of them, I’m taking pictures of their patients, and I think that really just got my brain going on how important the brain-hand relationship is,” she added. “And I can’t really think of anyone where it’s more important than (for) a surgeon.”
This connection inspired “Portraits: Working Hands.” For this series, Porter-Woodruff photographed a dozen spotlit pairs of hands of artists, chefs and hairdressers emerging from the shadows.
“I wanted to make sure that we don’t forget about the darkness that our hands can produce, which is why the photos are seemingly shot in darkness,” Porter-Woodruff explained. “A big example I usually use to talk about the darkness that they can produce is (politicians) signing into law discriminatory policies.”
One image, which shows two hands meticulously wrapping hair around a set of green hair rollers, echoes some of Porter-Woodruff’s images of surgeons delicately using their hands on a patient’s body. Though the subjects differ, Porter-Woodruff gives the same attention and respect to both images and both uses of human hands.
Porter-Woodruff is now thinking about the role of technology in our lives, specifically in the lives of children. Though she doesn’t have a set timeline for her next exhibition after “Working Hands,” she hopes to start a conversation on the dangers of technology in the hands of young children, and the kinds of play that young people in current times aren’t exposed to anymore.
“Portraits: Working Hands” is on view at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave., until May 18.
