Cold War Wonderland: Photographing the East/West Divide
By: Maria PopovaWhat Soviet babushkas have to do with the fall of the Roman Empire and the Egyptian Revolution.
Jason Eskenazi grew up in Queens during the peak of the Cold War, bombarded by the era’s typical propaganda about “The Evil Empire” on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Convinced that reality must be less black-and-white than what the Reagan administration was making it up to be, Eskenazi took off from his day job as security guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent a decade documenting life in the former Soviet Union in stunning black-and-white photographs, collected in Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith. The result is an almost surreal, anachronistic, poetic portrait of a culture seemingly frozen in time, exuding an odd yet alluring symmetry between beauty and tragedy.
There were all these things from 50 years ago, and everything looked like the photography that I was brought up on.” ~ Jason Eskenazi
Army Base, Karagandar, Kazakhstan, 1998
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Holiday, Shutilova, Russia, 2000
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Caspian Sea Baku, Azerbaijan, 1997
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Young Sailors Club, Kostrama, Russia, 2000
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Farm Milkmaid, Northern Kazakhstan, 1998
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Space Museum, Moscow, 1998
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Waltz Competition, Moscow, 1996
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Hill of Crosses, Lithuania, 2000
Image courtesy of Jason Eskenazi via NPR
Images via NPR
This month, Eskenazi, now a Fulbright Scholar, is setting out to create an ambitious companion narrative to Wonderland — The Black Garden, a fascinating look at the East-West divide that seeped into culture long past the end of the Cold War explored through the lens of mythology, from the Trojan War, to the fall of the Roman Empire, to the Ottoman conquest of Europe, to today’s post-9/11 conflicts in the Middle East and the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. And he’s funding it on Kickstarter.
It’s a truly inspired project, equal parts ambitious and needed, so please join me in supporting it.
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The lantern slide — a transparent image on glass that was magnified and projected onto a surface using a sciopticon “magic lantern” — came of age shortly after it was first introduced by Philadelphia daguerreotypists William and Frederick Langenheim in 1849. The lantern slide greatly broadened the audience for photography, then still a young art, introducing it into academia and the cultural institutions of the day by allowing teachers and museum curators to illustrate their lectures and presentations with projected images.
