by Jerome D.
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Introduction
Jason Eskenazi (b. 23 April 1960, Queens, New York) is an American photographer, publisher, and editor whose three-decade engagement with the former Soviet Union, the ancient Mediterranean world, and the communities that inhabit the fault lines between cultures has produced one of the most singular and critically admired bodies of documentary work in contemporary photography.
His interest in photography began at eight years old, at his brother's Bar Mitzvah, where he spent the evening following the hired photographer around without raising a camera — just watching, fascinated by what the photographer was doing. Eight years later, his father bought him his first camera: a 35mm Cavalier — an inexpensive Pentax knock-off — with which he photographed for his high school and college yearbooks. "It was a way to get close to people," he has said.
The decisive turn in his life came in 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall pulled him out of Queens and into the wider world. He bought a photographer's jacket, a stack of Tri-X film, packed his Nikon F3 and his Leica M6, and flew to Berlin with no plan beyond walking the Wall. "My plan was to just walk the wall… to be there… to be close to where history was unfolding." From Berlin he followed other photographers to Bucharest for Romania's first democratic elections, and then, in 1991, to Russia — arriving just before the August coup that marked the final collapse of the Soviet Union.
He returned to Russia and the former Soviet republics again and again over the following decade, accumulating the archive that became Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith (2008) — a book that took ten years to photograph and won Best Photography Book at Pictures of the Year International in 2008. Wonderland was shown at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan and at the Leica Gallery in New York.
His awards include the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize (1999), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), the Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant (1996), and the Fulbright Scholarship (2004). He is the founder of Red Hook Editions (his independent publishing house), DOG FOOD magazine, and The Americans List — a curated resource of American documentary photography. He leads workshops internationally.
As he described his practice to the Beirut Street Photographers: "I'm a photographer who a long time ago found a language for my soul in black and white photography."
Camera Gear Used by Jason Eskenazi
Eskenazi's gear is documented across several strong sources: the Oktana by Raskolnick profile provides the most detailed account of his original kit for the Berlin/Russia work, naming both cameras and film stock directly from his own account. Wikipedia and LensCulture confirm the 4×5 large format camera for the Title Nation project. His own BSP interview confirms his commitment to black-and-white film as a primary working medium.
Early Career Cameras
Cavalier 35mm (Pentax knock-off) — His first camera, bought by his father when Eskenazi was 17. A basic, inexpensive 35mm SLR with which he photographed high school and college yearbooks. The camera that began the practice. He has described photography at that stage as a tool for getting close to people — a social instrument as much as an optical one.
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| Cavalier 35mm Find one at MPB |
Nikon F3 — His confirmed SLR system in his early documentary career, named specifically in the Oktana profile describing his departure for Berlin in 1989: "He packed his Nikon F3 and his Leica M6 and set out for Berlin." The Nikon F3 was Nikon's flagship professional film SLR of the 1980s — rugged, reliable, and widely used by photojournalists of his generation. He carried it alongside the Leica M6 as a complementary system.
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| Nikon F3 Find one at MPB |
Primary Documentary Camera: Leica M6
Leica M6 — His confirmed primary documentary camera, named directly in the Oktana profile: he packed both the Nikon F3 and the Leica M6 for his first trip to Berlin in 1989, the trip that launched his decade-long engagement with the former Soviet Union. The M6 was his Leica rangefinder of choice throughout the period that produced Wonderland. His work was exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York — a relationship consistent with his use of the system for his most significant project.
The Leica M6 is a fully mechanical 35mm rangefinder film camera with a built-in TTL light meter — the camera that defined professional rangefinder photography from its introduction in 1984 through to the early 2000s. For Eskenazi's working method — moving through post-Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet republics, often in difficult conditions with limited access to professional services — the M6's mechanical simplicity, reliability without batteries (the meter requires them but the shutter does not), and compact, unobtrusive form were directly relevant.
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| Leica M6 Find one at MPB |
His choice to carry both the Nikon F3 (SLR) and the Leica M6 (rangefinder) simultaneously reflects the practice of a generation of documentary photographers who used the reflex for longer lenses and specific situations requiring through-the-lens viewing, while keeping the rangefinder as the primary, always-ready camera for street and portrait work at normal focal lengths.
Large Format: 4×5 Camera (Title Nation Project)
4×5 large format camera — Confirmed by both Wikipedia and LensCulture for his 2004–2005 Fulbright project, Title Nation, made in collaboration with Russian photographer Valeri Nistratov. Wikipedia states directly: "They made color portraits of people using a 4×5 large format camera." LensCulture confirms: "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."
The shift from handheld Leica and Nikon to a 4×5 view camera on a tripod for Title Nation is a significant and deliberate change of approach — one that mirrors Bruce Davidson's use of a view camera for East 100th Street. The 4×5 imposes a formal, slow, mutually consented encounter with every subject. For a project specifically concerned with making colour portraits of people across the vast Russian Federation — from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok — the formality of the large format camera transformed the act of photographing into a clear, transparent transaction between photographer and subject, requiring stillness and presence from both parties. The specific brand and model of 4×5 camera used are not confirmed in available primary sources.
Film Stock
Kodak Tri-X (black-and-white) — His confirmed primary film for the black-and-white documentary work that defines his practice, including Wonderland. The Oktana profile is direct: before leaving for Berlin in 1989, "he bought a whole bunch of Tri-X film." His commitment to Tri-X is consistent with the visual quality of Wonderland — its wide, rich tonal range has been specifically noted by other photographers studying the book, one of whom described discovering Eskenazi's work through searching for a film that could produce "a marvellous wide tonal range." Wikipedia confirms the documentary black-and-white approach: "the photography style appears documentary black and white."
Colour film (Title Nation) — The Title Nation project on the 4×5 was shot in colour — confirmed by both Wikipedia and LensCulture. The shift to colour large format for a project specifically about portraying Russian identity across the Federation's geography was a conscious and significant departure from his habitual black-and-white rangefinder practice.
Technique and Style
Jason Eskenazi's photography is defined by a quality he has articulated with precision across multiple interviews: the use of photography to find metaphors for experiences and feelings that cannot be expressed in any other way. His images are documentary in their method — real places, real people, unstaged — but their selection, sequencing, and framing are driven by something closer to poetry than to reportage.
He describes his style as "a very straight documentary style that's infused with longing, desire, and satire." The longing is visible in every frame of Wonderland — the specific quality of post-Soviet life, caught between the loss of one world and the uncertain arrival of another, photographed by an outsider who returned to it again and again across a decade because he was unable to stop. "Wonderland is about nostalgia, choices, missed chances, the search for life… the finding of love and the loss of love. For me it is the metaphor of the Soviet Union."
His working method is rooted in the Robert Frank tradition of the American road book — the photographer who moves through a landscape accumulating images that only become a coherent statement in the editing and sequencing. He has cited both Robert Frank's The Americans and Josef Koudelka's Gypsies as the two bodies of work he most admires — both decade-long projects, both built through immersive, sustained engagement rather than assignment-based visits. He has said directly: "The greatest projects that I admire, and the bodies of work that impress me the most generally take decades."
His use of the fairy tale as a structural framework — Wonderland draws explicitly on Alice in Wonderland, likening the collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of childhood — reflects a literary and metaphorical intelligence that distinguishes his work from conventional photojournalism. The fairy tale structure is not imposed on the images retrospectively; it was the conceptual framework that guided the ten years of shooting, allowing him to select images based on their resonance within a particular kind of story rather than on their journalistic legibility or topicality.
He has described photography as an extremely selfish profession — one that requires protecting a "secret part" of oneself from any external claim. This commitment to photography as a primary psychological need, not a career strategy, is consistent with his biography: working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two years (2008–2009) to make ends meet after the financial strains of independent publishing; self-funding his projects through fellowships, grants, and Kickstarter campaigns; running Red Hook Editions as an independent press committed to books that commercial publishers would not take on.
How to Imitate His Style in Post-Processing
Eskenazi's black-and-white aesthetic — the wide, rich tonal range of Tri-X developed to hold information at both ends of the tonal scale — is one of the most admired in contemporary documentary photography. Pixlr is an excellent tool for approaching this look in a digital workflow:
Protect the full tonal range.
The characteristic quality that other photographers associate specifically with Eskenazi's Wonderland images — a "marvellous wide tonal range" — is the result of precise exposure and restrained development of Tri-X. In Pixlr's Curves tool, use a conservative S-curve that holds shadow detail and highlight luminosity simultaneously. Nothing should be pure black and nothing should be pure white unless the scene genuinely demands it.
Grain as structure, not texture.
Tri-X at box speed has a specific, medium-fine grain structure that is present but not aggressive. In Pixlr's Film Grain tool, use a moderate setting — enough to remove the plastic smoothness of digital conversion, but not so heavy that the grain competes with the content of the image. The grain should be felt, not seen.
Sequence, not just select.
Eskenazi's images gain their full meaning from their position within the book sequence — from what precedes and follows each frame in the published order. When editing your own documentary work in Pixlr, consider not just whether each individual image succeeds on its own terms, but how it works in relation to the images around it. Export multiple images with consistent tonal treatment and lay them out as a sequence before deciding which ones to use.
Allow metaphorical ambiguity.
His images work as metaphors as well as documents — they mean more than their literal content. In post-processing, resist the impulse to clarify or simplify every element. An image that has some ambiguity in its tone, some suggestion in its composition that points beyond the literal, is closer to his aesthetic than a clean, perfectly readable documentary record.
How to Shoot Like Jason Eskenazi
Think in decades, not assignments.
Wonderland took ten years. The Black Garden was another sustained project. His explicit advice — that the greatest bodies of work take decades — is not a counsel of patience but a description of the only process by which a project of genuine depth can be produced. Choose a subject you can commit to for ten years and begin.
Go where history is happening and walk.
His plan for Berlin in 1989 was to walk the Wall — no more, no less. This is both the simplest and the most productive photographic strategy: go to the place where something is happening, walk through it, and photograph what you find. The photographer's jacket and the Tri-X film are in the bag. The plan is walking.
Find the metaphor before you find the frame.
His documentary work is driven by conceptual frameworks — the fairy tale, the Greek myth, the east-west divide — that determine which images matter and which do not. Before beginning a sustained project, identify the metaphorical or conceptual register within which the work will operate. The framework guides the shooting and the editing without predetermining either.
Carry a rangefinder and know its limits.
The Leica M6's limitations — no long telephoto capability, no through-the-lens viewing at the moment of exposure, no autofocus — are the conditions under which his most celebrated work was made. The limitations enforce a working distance, a focal length range, and a quality of attention that the absence of those limitations would not produce. Know what your camera cannot do and make that incapacity part of your visual language.
Be willing to change format when the project demands it.
He moved from handheld Leica and Nikon to 4×5 large format on a tripod for Title Nation because the project — colour portraits of Russians across the Federation's full geographic span — required the formal encounter that large format imposes. Let the project's logic determine the camera, not the other way around.
Publish your own work if you have to.
Red Hook Editions exists because the books Eskenazi wanted to publish could not find commercial publishers willing to take them on. His commitment to the photobook as the primary vehicle for his work was strong enough to build an independent publishing infrastructure to support it. If the work matters, find the way to get it into print.
Legacy
Jason Eskenazi's significance in contemporary photography is most clearly visible in the cult status of Wonderland — a book published in two sold-out editions, with secondhand copies selling at significant premiums, and cited repeatedly by photographers across the world as one of the works that most changed how they thought about what a documentary photography book could be.
The book's achievement is the sustained, poetic coherence of its visual narrative across ten years and an enormous geographic range. It is not a journalistic record of the Soviet collapse — there are many of those. It is a meditation on loss, childhood, and the end of a way of life, structured like a fairy tale and shot like a documentary, that requires the viewer to bring their own associative intelligence to the images rather than simply reading a predetermined narrative.
His institutional recognition — the Guggenheim, the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, the Fulbright — placed him in a tradition of serious American documentary photography that extends from Walker Evans and Robert Frank through to the present. His exhibition at Visa pour l'Image, the most important photojournalism festival in the world, and at the Leica Gallery in New York confirmed his standing within both the photojournalistic and the fine art photography worlds simultaneously.
His publishing and editorial work — Red Hook Editions, DOG FOOD magazine, The Americans List — extends his practice beyond his own images into the broader culture of photography, reflecting a commitment to the medium's institutional health as well as to his own creative output. His workshops, conducted internationally, have influenced a significant number of photographers working in the documentary tradition.
Books by Jason Eskenazi
Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith (2008, Red Hook Editions) — His defining work and the book that established his international reputation. Ten years of photographs from Russia and the former Soviet republics, 1991–2001, structured as a fairy tale using Alice in Wonderland as its conceptual framework. Winner of Best Photography Book, Pictures of the Year International, 2008. Both print editions are sold out.
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| Find it at Amazon |
Beyond the Wall (self-published) — A collaborative project with Russian photographer Valeri Nistratov, made under a Fulbright Scholarship in 2004–2005, travelling from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok and making 4×5 colour portraits of people across the Russian Federation.
The Black Garden (Red Hook Editions) — His second major book, photographed in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks — from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus — investigating the east-west divide. The second volume of a planned trilogy begun with Wonderland.
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| See it at Amazon |
Where to See Jason Eskenazi's Work
- Publisher website: redhookeditions.com — his independent publishing house, Red Hook Editions, through which his books are available and his practice is documented.
- Instagram: @jasoneskenazi — his personal account.
- LensCulture: lensculture.com/jason-eskenazi — his LensCulture profile, with extended biography and image selection.
- DOG FOOD magazine: His photography magazine, available through Red Hook Editions, featuring his own work and that of photographers he admires.
- The Americans List: His curated online resource of American documentary photography, maintained as a reference for photographers and students.
- Podcast: Episode 147 of A Small Voice: Conversations with Photographers (Ben Smith, UK) provides one of the most comprehensive audio interviews with Eskenazi about his practice and his books.
Conclusion
Jason Eskenazi left Queens for Berlin in 1989 with a Nikon F3, a Leica M6, and a stack of Kodak Tri-X film. He walked the Wall, followed history to Romania and then Russia, and spent the next decade returning to the former Soviet Union with the same cameras and the same film until he had enough images for Wonderland. For the Title Nation project, he traded the handheld cameras for a 4×5 large format view camera and colour film — the formal encounter of a view camera on a tripod appropriate to the scale and deliberateness of colour portraits across the full width of Russia.
His practice is a case study in what sustained commitment to a subject, over decades, with minimal equipment and a clear conceptual framework, can produce. The books are sold out. The prints are sought after. The equipment that made them was a Leica, a Nikon, and a stack of Tri-X.
"There was only one path for me."