2-03-2023 4:04am

Jade Doskow, BASH Graduate Class of '96, Searches for the Light as NYC Photographer

Lesley Misko Editor

by Jane Stahl

As a high school student, New York-based architectural and landscape photographer Jade Doskow enjoyed afternoons buried in the novels of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky with plans to major in Russian literature preparing her for the life of a literary scholar.

Instead, following a bad accident from her job as bike courier, she began a series of photographic self-portraits that led to a project that replicated the novelist’s tone and vision of the world in images that are often dark and haunting--described as “eerily poetic” as they capture moments where people, architecture, nature, and time come together in a moment—and then move on.

Doskow, a Boyertown High School Class of 1996 graduate, was featured in an exhibit at Studio B Fine Art Gallery in 2012 with Beth Ferraro and Bob Koch, several Boyertown High School graduates. Doskow’s photographs included images from a 13-year project of the “leftovers” from the World’s Fairs around the world and images from Red Hook, a section of Brooklyn, that, in its own way, had also been left behind.

In each of those long-term photography projects and ones that have followed throughout her career, Doskow’s intent is to document the passage of time on architecture and urban landscapes, perhaps looking for hope and renewal—perhaps the possibility of a way out of the existential angst, loss, and depression she found in Dostoevsky as a younger woman.

Undaunted

In the photography classes she teaches today, Doskow urges her students, emerging artists, to recognize that choosing the life of an artist requires a steadfast dedication to the work. So many tasks, so many places to be, so many people involved, so little time with just the right lighting. The work is endless; the motivation needed to envision the projects—sometimes years in the making—must never waver.

And while she recognizes that in today’s digital world, everyone is taking photos on their phone, she compares texting to writing: “Just because you write a text to a friend, it doesn’t make you a writer. And just because you can take a photo on your phone, it doesn’t make you a photographer. There’s so much to learn, so much involved in the artistry and production of photographs as art, so much work to make a living as an artist.

“Plus, you need to make sure to marry someone with health insurance!”

Doskow is a guest on the "B Inspired" audio podcast beginning 5:00 a.m. February 3, 2023. Find "B Inspired" on your favorite podcast platform like Spotify, Anchor.fm, Google, Apple, Castbox.

Below are descriptions of Doskow’s major projects that showcase her photographs and provide more context about her work. In many ways, the images provoke a profound reflection about what life means, one’s place in it, and what might be done after loss and deprivation. They prompt an appetite for hope and change—what the world needs now.

Lost Utopias

Doskow captured images of the Eiffel Tower in France; the Space Needle in Seattle, WA; Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome in Montreal, Canada, for example. She finds that there is no unifying statement about how the remains have been treated. Each city has responded differently; some preserve; others discard or repurpose or memorialize. What remains is simply the acknowledgement that life is complex, organic, constantly changing. Her project led to a 2021 documentary about her: Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias. https://www.jadedoskowdocumentary.com/

Red Hook

In her Red Hook project, she recalls convincing her then-boyfriend, now husband, to move to the “less tony” area where she was living but that had captured her photographer’s “eye” so that she could photograph Brooklyn’s abandoned section—sometimes at 3 a.m.

Red Hook today has been transformed since IKEA arrived in 2008, and Doskow and her family are moving back. But Doskow captured its ruined, depressed condition long before its revitalization. In 1990, Life Magazine named Red Hook the “crack capital” of America and listed it as one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. 'Everybody Loves Red Hook - or so they say' https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/nyregion/red-hook-brooklyn.html

Fresh Kills

A third on-going project for which she commissioned the New York authority for a position is what is known as the Freshkills Park in New York City. In 2021 she was named photographer-in-residence, focusing on the transformation of what was once the largest household waste dump on Earth into a massive urban park—a landfill-to-park project.

In announcing her position, prior to the exhibition of her photogaphs, the Freshkills Park Alliance notes:

"It has been inspiring to watch Jade immerse herself in the site and to see her translate, through large-format photographs, the complexities and paradoxical nature of this radical, highly engineered landscape. Through her work, she is documenting one of New York City’s greatest and most forward-looking infrastructure projects. It is our collective hope that these images will inspire communities globally to assess their own damaged landscapes, and to consider ways to reduce their waste and restore ecological habitats that, while perhaps different from the original, nonetheless create new verdant landscapes supporting diverse flora and fauna."

Freshkills Park Photographer-in-Residence: https://freshkillspark.org/os-art/jadedoskow

MODERN ART NOTES PODCAST - Freshkills in discussion with Tyler Green - Matthew Ronay and Jade Doskow

"How the World's Largest Garbage Dump Evolved into a Green Oasis"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/nyregion/freshkills-garbage-dump-nyc.html

Featured in the Cornell Biennial: https://cca.cornell.edu/portfolio/jade-doskow-2022-cornell-biennial/

Artist talk as part of Cornell 'Future Cities' colloquium: https://youtu.be/zupszJ-0x-Q

Instagram: @j_doskow

Other Projects

Yet another project documenting the effects of loss on the urban landscape took Doskow to areas annihilated by hurricane Sandy. Doskow’s photographs show those areas fared after 10 years. What she found was not surprising: the rich got richer and re-built their mansions; the poor got poorer and lived in more filth than before the storm.

OCTOBER 29, 2022 - JANUARY 31, 2023

The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) staged a group exhibition that began Oct 29, 2022, and runs through January 31, 2023. Curator Stanley Greenberg wrote,

"On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey, sending a storm surge over 14 feet high into the city’s southern coastlines, particularly parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Lower Manhattan. By the time the thousand-mile-wide storm passed, 17 percent of the city was underwater, more than 2 million homes had lost power, and 43 New Yorkers had lost their lives. Ten years later, although the memory of this catastrophic weather event looms large in the minds of many, the weaknesses it exposed in our city’s ability to adapt to and prepare for future climate disasters remain largely unresolved.

"The lack of progress made by the city was laid bare on September 1, 2021, when the arrival of Hurricane Ida triggered New York’s first-ever flash flood emergency. That evening, more than three inches of rain fell in Central Park in a single hour, inundating the sewer system and leading to the deaths of 18 more New Yorkers, many of whom drowned in the same type of unregulated basement apartments that had been the site of tragedy nine years earlier.

"In the last decade, New York City has received countless warnings and wake up calls about the need to prepare for our climate future. In addition to the storms and severe floods that capture headlines, rising temperatures and increased urban heat island effect threaten the livability and well-being of our neighborhoods on a silent, every-day basis.

"MAS hopes that by revisiting the devastating impacts that Sandy and Ida had on individual streets, communities, and families, these photographs help spur concrete progress toward a city-wide plan for climate change preparedness.

NEW YORK TIMES: TEN YEARS AFTER HURRICANE SANDY:
HOW HAS NEW YORK CITY FARED?

Photographs by Jade Doskow - Writing by Anne Barnard
In print - Metro Section, weekend edition October 29-30th
Online - Friday October 28th: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-nyc-10-year-anniversary.html

I was honored to take on a commission with the New York Times photographing how the hardest hit neighborhoods in all five boroughs of the city have fared ten years after Hurricane Sandy struck the region. It was a truly profound experience to visit the outer edges of our great city, from Locust Point in the Bronx to Edgemere and the Far Rockaways to the Eastern shore of Staten Island, where the city has offered buyouts to residents in low-lying flood-prone areas under the banner of 'managed retreat', essentially transforming residential neighborhoods into new wilderness. Ultimately making this work truly laid bare that New York is indeed a tale of two cities, with the poorest residents still at the greatest risk of suffering from future large storms while utility work drags on and on, leaving these vulnerable residents without front plazas, playgrounds, or even benches to sit upon. I also photographed portraits of researchers, scientists, and grassroots activists who have taken it upon themselves to reseed aquatic marshes in Jamaica Bay, represent tenants' rights in NYCHA housing, advocate for flood-prone blocks in low-lying blocks in Hollis, Queens, and design sensors to assess air pollution as well as residents who lived through Sandy and had to endure the hardships of having a home on a street below sea level. After several months of photographing for this story, I feel closer than ever to the city, its people, and the energy of each neighborhood.

Bio:
New York-based architectural and landscape photographer Jade Doskow is known for her rigorously composed and eerily poetic images that examine the intersection of people, architecture, nature, and time. Doskow is best-known for her work Lost Utopias, Freshkills, and Red Hook. Doskow holds a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is the subject of the 2021 documentary Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias; the film’s New York premiere was held at the International Center of Photography in October 2021 and has also screened at the Asheville Museum of Art and in film festivals internationally. Doskow was one of 50 women featured in the award-winning 2018 publication 50 Contemporary Women Artists from 1960 to the Present. Throughout her work, a sense of timeless monumentality in juxtaposition to modern details highlights surreal aspects of the contemporary cityscape. Doskow’s photographs have been featured in the New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Aperture, Photograph, Architect, Wired, Musée Mag, Smithsonian, Slate, and Newsweek Japan, among others. Doskow is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography and the City University of New York. Jade Doskow is the Photographer-in-Residence of Freshkills Park, New York City.Website: www.jadedoskowphotography.com