JASON ESKENAZI, b. 1960

Fulbright Scholarship, 2004
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999
Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, 1999
Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996

The fall of the Berlin Wall led me out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections I traveled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the USSR, and have returned many times since culminating in a photography book project called Wonderland: A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith, exhibited at Visa pour L'Image in Perpignan, France and at the Leica Gallery in New York, and is being published by DeMo Books, 2008.

In 2004 I received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia to make a series of large format color portraits called Title Nation with a Russian colleague.

I have received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999; The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, 1999, for my work in a Jewish Village in Azerbaijan; and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996. My work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek and The New York Times.

In 2004 -2005 I organized a Kids with Cameras workshop in the old city of Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children which I presented at the 92 Street Y in New York. It was also featured on ABC News and in National Geographic and Hadassah magazines. I am now organizing exhibitions for this project in the U.S. and I hope to bring it back to Israel and to the kids who shot it.

I am currently planning and researching my next project The Hubris of Empire set in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks. I am seeking out a sequence of visual metaphors that are once about the failure of those ideals and about a journey of lost traditions in an ever culturally ambiguous and ubiquitous world.