Jason Eskenazi - Storytelling and Visual Literacy

Photographer Jason Eskenazi, a Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, discusses storytelling and visual literacy through the extraordinary photographs he took for his book, Wonderland (which won the prestigious Pictures of the Year International Book Award in 2008). Jason illustrates what he calls the visual grammar of photography, which includes composition, light, perspective, and context, and how he strives to work within that grammar to capture images with an emotional resonance.

The fall of the Berlin Wall led Jason Eskenazi out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections he traveled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the USSR, and has returned many times since culminating in a photography book project called Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, winner of Best Photography Book 2008 by Pictures of the Year International.

In 2004 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia to make a series of large format color portraits called Title Nation with a Russian colleague which was published in Fall 2010.

Jason Eskenazi has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999; The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, 1999, for his work in a Jewish Village in Azerbaijan; and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996. His work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek and The New York Times and Soros Foundation publications.

In 2004 -2005 Eskenazi 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 economic reasons as well as to obtain health insurance Eskenazi took a job as a Security Guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 2008 – Nov 2009. He created and co-edited a new independent magazine for the guards called SW!PE which received a lot of media attention. While guarding the Looking Out exhibition at the museum he also created the Americans List, about The Americans, by Robert Frank.

In November 2009 Eskenazi quit the museum and used saved funds in order to continue photographing for his next project The Black Garden foset in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks, investigating the east-west divide, while basing himself in Istanbul. With Wonderland- Black garden- Departure Lounge, he created a trilogy completed and published in 2019.

While living in Istanbul he was the International Curator/ Creative Director for the Bursa Photo Fest, in Turkey, for its first 2 years. He was the International Curator for FotoIstanbul in 2014 and 2015. During his time as International Curator he brought some of the most famous photographers in the world to Turkey; including Mary Ellen Mark, Joseph Koudelka, William Klein, and dozens more.

He is also a co-founder and editor of Dog Food, a newspaper blending Cynic Philosophy and Photography; He is the sole owner of Red Hook Editions which gives the tools to photographers to take complete control of their work in book form. Red Hook Edition is a unique model in the photo-publishing world where the photographer makes money from their ART.

Eskenazi continues to travel, produce photographic work, and make books. He
recently spent time in 2025-2026 in the war-torn countries of Syria, and Ukraine.

This interview was created in partnership with Foundry Photojournalism Workshop. It was recorded during Foundry 2013 in Sarajevo.