“A Photo Student” James Pomerantz sits down with perennial Dvafoto favorite and inspiration Jason Eskenazi. Probably the best overview of his career and life I have come across outside of conversations with the man himself. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Thanks Jason and James for putting this out there!

Copies of his book Wonderland are still for sale direct from Eskenazi. Must have.

Reason to rejoice: Jason Eskenazi’s (previously) excellent book, Wonderland, is back in print, thanks to Red Hook Editions. 2008 POYi Best Photo Book, Wonderland explores Russia and the history of the Soviet Union as a fairytale, and is filled with many, many classic images. From the book summary:

For many, the Soviet Union existed, like their childhood, as a fairy tale where many of the realities of life were hidden from plain view. When the Berlin Wall finally fell so too did the illusion of that utopia. But time changes memory. The ex-Soviets confused the memory of their innocent youth for their nation’s utopian vision, unable to confront its history and thus creating nostalgia for tragedy. This book tries to seek and portray the socialist dream, the nightmare of the USSR beneath the veneer and the reality that emerged after the fall. And like all fairy tales try to teach us: the hard lessons of self-reliance. -Wonderland

update by Scott: Just bought myself a copy. Excited to see it when I’m back in Montana sometime in the next year.

Jason Eskenazi talks about Wonderland and Title Nation from Habitus A Diaspora Journal on Vimeo.

Thanks to Habitus Magazine for pointing us to their interview with Jason Eskenazi, whose book “Wonderland” (1 used at Amazon for $656.00!) you should know. In the video, Eskenazi discusses the narrative structure of Wonderland, the nature of being a photographer, finding pictures in Grozny, and collaborating with Valerii Nistratov for the portraits in “Title Nation.” The video was produced as part of Habitus‘ Moscow issue.

I’ve had a quiet week here in Belgrade waiting for housing and jobs to come through, will actually hear about both on Tuesday. So I’ve had the chance to spend some quality time looking at imagery on the interweb (as you saw in my last post about Oculi), here is some of what I’ve been looking at.

Firstly, as I discovered while entering my own work, there is a trove of wonderful, unusual and otherwise unknown-to-me projects available on the Oskar Barnack Award website from Leica. Beyond 20 some years of winning projects, they are posting all of the entries from this year in their entirety. Direct links here: Oskar Barnack Award Entries 2009 and the brand new Newcomers Award 2009, which I entered (lookie). You can even search by country or by name. I’m sure to be spending many hours in the coming days combing through .. I’ve already found some great projects from people (and places!) I’ve never heard of. Unfortunately my connection and/or the site is really slow so I can’t easily pull up many examples for you. Just go digging, you’ll enjoy yourself.

Amy Stein’s blog brought the work of Jen Davis to my attention. Really interesting stuff. Outside my normal purview, but I love it. Really good personal photography, and pretty different than I have seen before.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland is an incredible, moving book. And he is a great guy too (helped so much with editing my portfolio six weeks ago). So many congratulations to him for winning POYi’s Best Photography Book award last week. Unfortunately, there still isn’t an ideal place to look at the pictures. Oddly, the best may be this page at NPR which has a terrific little segment from Eskenazi and Gene Richards talking about the project.

And also from POYi, I see that Eugene Richards won special recognition for his project and book A Procession of Them. It is a touching, utterly humanistic body of work about mental illness and its (lack of humane) treatment around the world. A similar project, which I also admire from the depths of my soul, by Kevin German has been updated with a third installment. As I’ve told him before, this is special work. And beyond his contributions with pictures, German recently solicited donations from his blog readers to help support the people at the institution he was photographing. Incredible, hat’s off to you sir.

I don’t know how new this is or how I came across it in the first place, but the indomitable Chien-Chi Chang has a new project with National Geographic about North Korean refugees. Oddly from Chien-Chi, I’m not loving the pictures on a visual level, but the story (and story telling) is great and important.

Lastly, PDN has just announced the honorees of their special PDN 30 under 30 issue for 2009. I haven’t had a chance to look through yet, but there usually is some good stuff in there. I’ve known Dominic Nahr’s work for awhile, so congrats to him (and the others who I’m not familiar with .. this ‘win’ surely will bring some eyes, including mine).

And not to neglect the selfpromo, announcing my new Photoshelter archive. Been loading it up lately with the old and the new. See M. Scott’s too!

Been in a little funk over the weekend after hearing that I didn’t get an important grant from my university that was to fund my Russia story.. there are other paths and I’m pursuing them vigorously but this was a bummer. Spent much of the last few days reading, looking, listening and thinking and, since I haven’t come up with a big post to write from any of them, I’ll have to dump on you another massive link roundup. Lots of interesting things and terrific photographs, hope something suits your fancy if you’re looking for a little education or entertainment.

I’ve had a borrowed copy of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde on my desk for a few weeks and I just found time to read through. Fucking brilliant, and utterly heartbreaking. If you’re not familiar, it is a illustrated piece of journalism .. war journalism in ‘comic book’ form. Brought me right back to all of the people I know and the things I’ve seen in Bosnia .. Gilles Peress had it right, first, with the sentiment behind his book “Farewell to Bosnia”. Gone, gone was the idea of a true multi-ethnic Bosnia. And this isn’t something that has gone away, warns Richard Holbrooke in the Guardian. I’ll be delving into this deeply when I’m back over there.. (also, reading this inspired me to go find my copy of Eugene Richard’s The Fat Baby.. which has a story I haven’t seen anywhere else about his trip to a Serb war hospital in Bosnia in 1995.. if you have the book go look and read.)

Got up this yesterday morning and found a particularly interesting post by Kevin German on his blog Wandering Light, featuring a new body of work he is starting on mental illness in Vietnam. I think it is a tremendous start of a story with beautiful photographs .. well worth a look. Very interesting timing, too, as I saw Friday for the first time Eugene Richards’ new book A Procession of Them at the bookstore. An important topic and I admire these photographers for pursuing this difficult story .. I spent an hour in an institution in Kosovo this past June (one that Richards covered much better in his own book) and it was a draining situation.. hats off to these men.
(c) Kevin German

I know that at least a few of you out there are interested in the Balkans like me, and I’ve got to recommend a story in Vanity Fair about Ramush Haradinaj, “House of War”. A remarkably well done piece about this man, who is a former KLA general and PM of Kosovo and an acquitted war criminal. Plenty of background about the war in the West of Kosovo too.

I’ve mentioned Jason Eskenazi and his new book Wonderland a couple of times now (1, 2), and last week NPR published an interview with him, and you can listen online. Eugene Richards even pops up to give some nice commentary. Seems like everyone is noticing and writing about this book these days, also see the write-up on The Fader’s website.

Here is an interesting (if slightly formulaic) article from the Washington Post (signin might be required .. try bugmenot.com if you need one) about Barack Obama’s transition from ‘normal guy’ to President. “Much to His Chagrin, ‘Plain Old Barack Is Gone’”. Odd picture of a scary secret service guy, but otherwise I enjoyed this peek into the transition.

From the wonderful Wooster Collective blog: Old photo-street art, and Michael Rakowitz’s ParaSites, inflatable shelters for the homeless, and an example (with Gaia) of Wooster’s revived and terrific “The A’s to our Q’s” series. Beyond cool art, they’re great little interviews .. inspiration for our series here on Dva too.

I have no idea what kind of reputation the magazine MONOCLE has, I only ran into it while traveling through Heathrow some months ago. Beyond way too expensive items recommended, there is a terrific design and feel to the mag. I’m curious to know more about it.. (chime in please if you know something). On their website I just saw a nifty little video-story about “New designs on diplomacy”, the process behind designing new embassies (in this case UK and Norway) in stressed locales. Quite interesting.

For anyone out there who is still wanting to wallow in the Digital Railroad mess, here is a lengthy piece (which I admit I haven’t read completely) by Photoshelter CEO Allen Murabayashi: “What Happened to Digital Railroad?”.

I can’t remember where I first saw G.M.B. Akash’s work from Bangladesh, but I was reminded again when he wrote on Lighstalkers that he won the 2008 Kindernothilfe Media Award in Germany for a story on Child Labor. See the story, which includes this World Press winning picture, on his website.

11th Annual Postcards From the Edge: A Benefit for Visual AIDS seems like a very interesting opportunity to donate a small piece of work for a good cause. Check it out.

More music (video): “Create Your Own Rainbow”, a chance to mix your own version of Radiohead’s “15 Step” off of In Rainbows via a crazy interface and 12 camera angles. I don’t have enough bandwidth where I’m at, apparently, to make it run smoothly but maybe you’ll have more luck.

Lastly, Colberg at Conscientious writes On photography collectives. In short, he is ‘pro’ photographers working together and can’t figure out why there aren’t more Congrats again to Luceo for being ahead of the curve.

We’re working a lot of interesting things for the coming weeks, some more interviews and I’ll have more to chat about my near-term plans for a marketing trip to New York and the move to Belgrade. Stay tuned!

Taking a page from WTJ I want to suggest that our New York readers, or those people who will be in town November 13 (through January 10, 2009), to check out the opening reception of Jason Eskenazi’s WONDERLAND at the Leica Gallery. I previously wrote about this book, and sadly have yet to find a copy for myself, but this seems like a great chance to see the work and don’t just take it from me: go read Bob Black gushing. Check that link too for all the details. (One editorial note: the Leica Gallery website has a different exhibition listed for this same period but I imagine there has been some reshuffling and that Bob has given us the correct info)