147 - Jason Eskenazi
© Jason Eskenazi
Jason Esekenazi is a photographer, curator and co-founder of the photobook publishing community Red Hook Editions. He lives in Queens, New York, where he grew up and went to university, taking a degree in psychology and American literature at Queens College.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led Jason out of New York into the wider world and after trips to Germany and Romania he travelled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union. So began over a decade of return trips to the region which eventually culminated in Jason’s first book, Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, which won Best Photography Book in Pictures of the Year International in 2008. Using the fairy tale as a framework, Jason took the title of his book from Alice in Wonderland, and likens the breakup of the Soviet Union to the end of childhood. Wonderland ended up being the first in a trilogy of books spanning 30 years worth of work. Each volume consists of three sections numbered one to nine and the numbering of the images is consecutive across the whole trilogy. The second book was Black Garden, shot within the vast geographical and mythical world known to ancient Greece from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus, including Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, and Sicily, as well as New York City. The book uses Greek mythology as its framework and concentrates on three main themes: subjugation of women, domination over the animal kingdom, and self-destruction through war. The final book in the trilogy, published simultaneousluy with Black Garden in 2019, is Departure Lounge, which investigates how we depart from reality, from friends, and from ourselves and completes the cycle by revisiting the territory and some of the characters of the first book, drawing on Jason’s extensive archive from his decade long travels through Russia.
Jason has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant. His work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. In 2004 Jason In 2004 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia to make a series of large format color portraits called Title Nation with Russian colleague Valeri Nistratov which was published in 2010. In 2004 -2005 Jason organized a Kids with Cameras workshop in the old city of Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children, which toured many U.S. cities.
For much of 2008 and 2009 Jason took a job as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to earn some money and to obtain health insurance. He created and co-edited a new independent magazine called SW!PE which showcased the artwork of museum guards. While assigned to the museum’s Robert Frank exhibition Looking In, Jason also began the creation of the book The Americans List: By the Glow of the Jukebox, which asks over 250 photographers to name and talk abouit their favourite photograph from Frank’s seminal work, The Americans.
Jason was also the International Curator/ Creative Director for the Bursa Photo Fest in Turkey for its first 2 years and a co-founder and editor of DOG FOOD, a newspaper blending Cynic Philosophy and Photography.
On episode 147, Jason discusses, among other things:
Why he found the idea of working in the USA scarier than in a far flung war zone.
Waiting for chance to give you something.
The inciting incident: the Berlin Wall coming down.
Learning how to see things… and to make book dummies.
Russians and the fairy tale - Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith.
Why a lot of it is play.
Keeping things open ended.
What he’s thinking about now.
Referenced:
“A lot of it is playing. It’s play. Play with the images, play with the notes, play with the strings on your guitar - tune one to a lower D and see how that works. You just sort of play and that’s how you create things.”
THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY THE CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB - THE LATEST AND GREATEST PHOTOBOOKS, EXPERTLY CURATED AND DELIVERED TO YOU DOOR WITH FREE SHIPPING AND NO HASSLES.
INFORM THE MIND, INSPIRE THE SOUL
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