I have known Jonathan Blaustein for a few years now, we met at a Medium Festival portfolio review. He liked my work and I liked his insight into the medium of photography. He is an educator and writer (contributor to the New York Times Lens Blog and others) as well as being a photographer.
In November of 2019 I saw a Tweet by Jonathan about his Kickstarter campaign for a proposed book. The project was described as this: "Extinction Party" is a limited edition photo book about over-consumption, and its impact on the planet”.
I headed over to his Kickstarter campaign and checked it out. I liked the concept but was not exactly sure how the example images were congruent. I figured that seeing the finished product was the only way to fully understand it so I jumped in and supported Jonathan’s project.
With the current pandemic my copy arrived later that most folk’s copies because it was delivered to a closed office, where I used to ship all my packages to. A few weeks back I finally got my copy and now I am finally getting time to review the book with this blog post.
I wrote Jonathan after spending some time with the book and told him this: “You nailed it, I wasn’t quite sure what it would be like when I jumped in on the Kickstarter but figured it would be good. It’s very tight.” The concept was good when he went to press in 2019 and viewing it now during the COVID19 pandemic, the book’s value has multiplied, it is pretty incredible. There are so many parallels that can be drawn between the questions Jonathan asks about the over-consumption habits of our society and the priorities in life people have rediscovered after living in a COVID19 lockdown world. There are also some incredible ironies now in the book, like the image of a white cotton museum glove with the title “No one’s hands are clean” and image of a candy necklace titled “One dollar’s worth of candy necklace from China”.
My work is so different than Jonathan’s body of work (yes, diversity within the medium is a good thing) so when I was going through the book seeing his message so well, how the images all tied in together, I actually got fired up. I loved the fact that even though we see differently, I still found his message was clear and concise. This brings me to the images in the book, since it is a photography book, I need to talk about the images. I guess at first glance someone could describe many of his photographs as simplistic product portraits but I found when I spent time with them, and took in the entire project, his images have a lot of depth. The images are carefully constructed and do have a lot of value individually but then more value when viewed as a series.
The book was published by Yoffy Press and printed in Amsterdam. Solid build, nice paper stock & printing, and the layout and design are prefect for the project. I encourage folks to check it out.
Click here for a Link to Yoffy Press for more information and ordering