Via NPR, I came across the work of photographer Jason Eskenazi, a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who began documenting the former Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago, in 1989.
The results are stunning.
What strikes me most about Eskenazi’s black-and-white portraits is the visual disconnect between the eras each photograph invoke and when the pictures were, in fact, actually taken. I often joke about Russians’ affinity for Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson and two-ply toilet paper, but the subjects upon whom Eskenazi trains his eye are even more entrenched in the past than I had originally thought.
Here is Eskenazi explaining his work:
When the Berlin Wall came down, it was almost as if they were set out on a journey to find themselves and who they were after 70 years of a childhood.Eskenazi, who has compiled his photographs into one collection, Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, also told NPR’s Margot Adler that his work explores the difficulty of losing what you always thought would be there.
“What I realized,” he said, “was that the people I was encountering had a nostalgia for tragedy.”
Eskenazi’s point is best illustrated in my favorite shot, “Hotel Moskva, Moscow, 1998”. In it, he shoots through an open window in the famous hotel, which closed down five years ago. On the left, we see Red Square-- and, really, all the square represents. On the right, a lace curtain and a young woman’s naked back, as she stares forlornly down to the scene below. The tension in her back betrays just how heavily the history of her country weighs down on her, even as she, presumably, tries to get away for a few days.
It’s heartbreakingly beautiful.
Click through to see a gallery of Eskenazi’s work. You won’t be disappointed.
