Extinction Party - Jonathan Blaustein
Extinction Party - Jonathan Blaustein
Since 2008, at the onset of the Great Recession, photographer and conceptual artist Jonathan Blaustein has been working on art projects that investigate consumption in America, and he brings them together in one narrative in his first book, Extinction Party.
As the world grapples with the impact of climate change in the 21st Century, Blaustein's art presents a deconstructed view of the manner in which humans churn up the planet's resources for profit. Whether photographing food from around the world, nature harvested on his property outside Taos, NM, years worth of accumulated junk in his former studio, or party supplies from the mega-corporation Party City, the consistent message is that we're eating away at our home planet, at considerable peril to all its existing species. Party on!
Released March 2020
Photographs by Jonathan Blaustein
Essay by Kevin Kwan
Hardcover, four variations, 10 x 7.5 inches
96 pages
Edition of 400 (100 of each cover option)
ISBN: 978-1-949608-10-6
Trade Edition: $40.00
Review Quotes for Extinction Party
“Extinction Party is a meditation on worth and value, on consumption and the planet, on wealth and poverty, on what’s disposable and what endures, on the commodification of everything, on the artist’s own domestic environment.
If all of this sounds heady and hard to express visually, well, yeah, you’d think so. But Jonathan’s studio-made images are clean and bright and beautiful and funny and horrifying and personal and sweeping and memorable and—here’s the trick—simple. Or at least they APPEAR to be. Really, there’s got to be gobs of thought and strong instinct behind each little visual poem.”
- Bill Shapiro, Former Editor-in-Chief of LIFE magazine
”Extinction Party, the title of Jonathan Blaustein’s book (published in March 2020 by Yoffy Press), might feel a little on the nose for this moment, but sometimes things are more prescient than we plan. The book – which represent a decade’s worth of photographs and was in the works well before the pandemic – features deadpan still lifes, simple in content and conceptual in approach, that skewer consumer culture with black humor but also no small sense of alarm.”
- Jean Dykstra, photograph magazine
“But while many of the objects are bright or jovial, the undertow in Extinction Party evokes the feeling that something underneath the surface is wrong…Anyone for beautiful tongue-in-cheek conceptual photos about over consumption absurdity leading to inevitable extinction level events? Yes, please.”
- Cary Benbow, F-Stop Magazine
About Jonathan Blaustein
Jonathan Blaustein is an artist, writer, and educator based in Taos, New Mexico. He received his MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2004, and has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums the US, and in festivals in Europe as well. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the State of New Mexico, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions.
Jonathan is a regular contributor to the popular blog A Photo Editor, and spent six years as a photography critic for the New York Times Lens blog. He has also written about art and photography online for The New Yorker, VICE, and Hyperallergic. He taught photography at UNM-Taos for many years, and runs the Antidote Photo Retreat at his family horse farm outside Taos.