The Black Garden Trilogy (Wonderland/Black Garden/Departure Lounge) is complete with the printing and publication of the 2nd edition of Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith. This is a new edition, not a facsimile. This edition is bigger than the original book to match Departure Lounge. The edit and sequence are the same as the original version.

The story of Communism is the story of the twentieth century. 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. Wonderland is a photographic exploration that portrays both the reality beneath the veneer of a utopian USSR and the affirmation of hope that should never be abandoned. And like all fairy tales try to teach us: the hard lessons of self-reliance. 

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.

Jason Eskenazi has received numerous awards including a Fulbright in 2004; a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999; The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, 1999, and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996. 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. While guarding the Looking Out exhibition at the museum he also created The Americans List, about a seminal photo book, The Americans, by Robert Frank, now in its 3rd edition.

In November 2009 Eskenazi quit the museum and used saved funds in order to continue photographing for his next project The Black Garden, while basing himself in Istanbul. His Black Garden Trilogy was completed in 2020; Wonderland - Black Garden-Departure Lounge. He was a co-founder and editor of Dog Food photo-magazine (2012-2024). Eskenazi is the owner/creative director of Red Hook Editions, which gives the tools to photographers to take complete control of their work in book form.

Black Garden Trilogy Notes: Though the trilogy was constructed step by step, added on book by book, there is a cohesive structure by using consecutive chapters 1-9, and consecutive plate numbers 1-314, throughout the three books. The three books span the time frame of almost 30 years, basically the time frame of Eskenazi's photographic journeys, from when he made his first foray into the world landing in Moscow in 1991-2001, until living in Istanbul in 2010-2018. By the end of the trilogy one will see some similar images from the same contact sheets from previous books giving the impression that only a moment has passed during the last 30 years represented in these three volumes. Both Wonderland and Departure Lounge were sized to exactly fit into the parameters of Black Garden. Eskenazi says he was influenced by the religious triptychs he encountered while guarding European paintings at the museum.

WONDERLAND, SPECIAL EDITION WITH 8X10 IN. SILVER GELATIN PRINT*, SIGNED AND NUMBERED BY THE AUTHOR

*choice of two prints available

Reviews: Riot Material Magazine, "Photography as Bildungsroman: On Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, Black Garden and Departure Lounge,” by Allyn Gaestel