Jason Eskenazi was born in Queens, New York and attended Queens College, where he studied psychology and American Literature. He was also photo-editor of the college yearbook.
While in school, he assisted other photographers and worked for a local newspaper. After graduation he worked in darkrooms, obtained local photo assignments, and continued as an assistant, learning his trade.
When the Berlin Wall fell, he took that as his cue to pursue a career as a photo journalist. He went first to Berlin and Romania, and finally to Russia (still the Soviet Union), which would be his base for several years. During that time, he won an Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999, for his Russia work entitled Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith (forthcoming, DeMo Books, 2008). He received the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize for his story on the Jews of Azerbaijan, and a Fulbright Scholarship, 2004, for a collaborative project with a Russian colleague taking large-format color portraits of Russians.
His trip to Jerusalem for Kids-with-Cameras was his first to the region, and he learned about the situation in the Middle East through the eyes of the kids he taught. This exhibition is currently touring U.S. cities to foster communication between local American communities of Jews and Muslims and of all ethnic backgrounds. Eskenazi also hopes to bring the exhibit back to Jerusalem and to the kids who shot it.
Eskenazi is currently planning and researching his next personal project The Hubris of Empire set in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks. Eskenazi is 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.
To view this and other projects please visit
www.jasoneskenazi.com
