Jason Eskenazi

Biography

Eskenazi 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 (for its first democratic election) and to Germany, then Russia in 1991 just before the August coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union.

He is working on a trilogy of books. For the first of these, Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, he undertook an extensive documentary project in Russia and the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2001. He "took the title of his book from Alice in Wonderland, [and] likens the breakup of the Soviet Union (and the food and security provided by the Communist Party) 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 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 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 also one of the founding editors of Sw!pe magazine, created by guards at the Metropolitan who are artists in their free time.

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.

He is co-creator of a photography zine/newspaper titled Dog Food, published in print and online.

Publications by Eskenazi

Publications edited by Eskenazi

Publications with contributions by Eskenazi

Awards and grants

Solo exhibitions

Exhibitions with others

Exhibitions curated by Eskenazi

Collections

Eskenazi's work is held in the following collections: