Exhibition Closing Event - Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias (Screening and Q&A)

Architectural works from past world’s fair expositions are aspirational visions. Most of these fantastical structures were meant to be temporary, but dozens of examples still remain. Some legacies from past fairs have lasted more than a century, like the iconic Eiffel Tower. Others have descended into neglect and ruin in a few decades. But all of them represent the past remnants of a fictional future that has been redefined by more pragmatic needs.

Filmmaker Philip Shane follows architectural landscape photographer Jade Doskow on her 10-year quest to capture the monumental world’s fair echoes that remain worldwide. Lugging around her bulky, 4×5-inch large-format film camera, she travels to many cities across the globe, such as Paris, New York, Brussels, Montreal, Seville, Chicago and Seattle, among others. Rather than focus strictly on the subjects of the photos, Shane provides an insider’s look into the artist’s painstaking process of setting up precise vantage points for each building, taking a handful of frames at each location, then spending weeks or months on the digital editing process, careful to highlight subtle shadings and color patterns to create the perfect, immaculate print.

While the film follows Doskow’s devotion to faithfully represent the fate of these decaying utopian structures, it also focuses on her anxieties about how she is perceived by other artists and how she balances the demands of photography with the responsibilities of motherhood — something some of her male colleagues had encouraged her to avoid for the sake of her career. Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias takes the viewer on a journey through the mind of an artist struggling to navigate between the practical demands of her personal life and the hyper-idealistic relics of a future never fully realized.