Jason Eskenazi


Jason Eskenazi is an American photographer, based in Brooklyn, New York. The majority of his photography is from the countries of the former Soviet Union, including his book Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith.
Eskenazi received the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, both in 1999. Wonderland won first place in a book award from Pictures of the Year International in 2008.

Biography

Eskenazi was born April 23, 1960 in Queens, New York. He attended Bayside High School then studied psychology and American literature at Queens College. Whilst at Queens College he was photo editor for the yearbook, assisted photographers on assignment and worked as a freelance photographer for the Queens Tribune. After graduation he worked in darkrooms, obtained local photo assignments, continued as an assistant and interned at a photo agency in New York. At age 29, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, he began to travel and make photographs. His first trips were to Romania and to Germany, then Russia in 1991 just before the August coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union.
In 2004 and 2005 Eskenazi directed a Kids With Cameras project in Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children. Their photographs were exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Oklahoma, and Montreal, and in Eskenazi's self-published book, Beyond the Wall.
In 2005, funded by a grant from the Fulbright Program, Eskenazi and Russian photographer Valeri Nistratov travelled in the Russian Federation, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. They made colour portraits of people using a 4×5 large format camera, resulting in the book Title Nation.
From 2008 to 2009, for economic reasons as well as to obtain health insurance, Eskenazi worked as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During this time, he worked as a guard for the exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, which allowed him a lot of time to study and be inspired by Robert Frank's photographs. Also, Eskenazi asked renowned photographers and others he recognised visiting the exhibition what their favorite image from Frank's book The Americans was, and why. He edited the resulting notes and thoughts of 276 photographers into a book, By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List. William Meyers, writing in The Wall Street Journal, favourably reviewed The Americans List, as did photographer David Carol.
Eskenazi is one of the founding editors of Sw!pe magazine, created by guards at the Metropolitan who are artists in their free time. Eskenazi co-founded Red Hook Editions, a publishing cooperative of photographers. He is co-creator of a photography zine/newspaper titled Dog Food blending cynic philosophy and photography. published in print and online

The trilogy

Eskenazi's preferred way of disseminating his work is the photobook. His most important work consists of a trilogy of books spanning 30 years. Although they each have a different trim, they share a common design with bare boards and an open spine. Each consists of three numbered sections; the numbering of these sections, and of the plates, is consecutive. In each book, the photography style appears documentary black and white, but the photos are recontextualized in an imagined conceptual and visual narrative.
For the first of these books, Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, Eskenazi undertook an extensive project in Russia and the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2001. Using the fairy tale as a framework, he "took the title of his book from Alice in Wonderland, likens the breakup of the Soviet Union to the end of childhood." Eugene Richards commented: "Most photographers today either do art photography or create blunt, in-your-face messages. . . . The place he went to could be seen in a million ways, but Eskenazi always seems to capture the little non-moments, the lonely souls.". An exhibition of the work was held at the Leica Gallery in New York. The book won first prize in Pictures of the Year International's 'Best Use Books' category in 2008.
In 2011 Eskenazi successfully raised funding via a Kickstarter campaign to complete The Black Garden, his second major book project and the second in his trilogy, a photographic investigation of the East–west divide.
The framework for The Black Garden is Greek mythology, and the book was photographed within the vast territory known to the ancient Greeks, from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus, including Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, and Sicily, as well as New York City.
The third book in the trilogy, Departure Lounge completes the cycle by revisiting the territory of the first book, forming "an aged or matured Wonderland, as you can see some of the Wonderland characters reappearing in Departure Lounge". The book investigates how we depart from reality, from friends, and from ourselves. The Black Garden and Departure Lounge were published simultaneously in 2019. Eskenazi felt that with that release, his work was completed, and has stated his intention to quit photography and start a family.

Publications

Publications by Eskenazi

Solo exhibitions

Eskenazi's work is held in the following collections: