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Photographer Jason Eskenazi traveled throughout Russia before and after the fall of the USSR and created a remarkable photobook that reverberates with the classic structure of dark fairy tales
My backordered copy of Jason Eskenazi's The Americans List finally arrived a few days ago, and I've been slowly pouring through it. It is ...
My backordered copy of Jason Eskenazi's The Americans List finally arrived a few days ago, and I've been slowly pouring through it. It is a dense book, 83 pages exactly (!) of thick text printed at maybe 4 pt fontsize. I can do maybe 4 or 5 pages at a time before I get brainfreeze. I know what you're thinking. Ugh! Do we really need another book about The Americans? How many is that now? And how many blog posts? Trust me, none of them are quite like this one. For starters, this one is only a few bucks and fits in a pocket.
After developing their film, most photographers snip off and throw away the double-zero frame, at the beginning of the roll, that is usually half-exposed. Jason Eskenazi is not like most photographers (anyone who knows him will tell you that), and he’s been saving those frames for many years.
Jason Eskenazi, formerly the most important photographer working as a museum guard (when we visited him in September 2009), is now the former museum guard with the most important photographic project: “The Black Garden” — a personal exploration of the great East-West divide in Eurasia.
Originally Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith was published by De.MO but only half the print run was realized so it sold out...
The style of Eskenazi's photography follows the lead of the likes of Gilles Peress -- an accomplishment considering the plethora of bad photojournalism that is far too wrapped up in visual geometry and gymnastics at the expense of deeper content. Eskenazi has learned to make compelling photographs that have the strength of both form and content.
Showcase: Russian Noir – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com:
In the last 25 years, you might have run into Jason Eskenazi in Haiti, Afghanistan, Russia, Georgia, Ukraine or Dagestan. He may have been photographing on assignment for Time or The Times, or working on projects financed by a Guggenheim or a Fulbright grant. Today, if you want to see Mr. Eskenazi, you don’t have to go farther than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s the short, middle-aged man in the guard uniform watching the sunlight fall on the statues in the Greek galleries.