Fellowship, he left the university in order to take up photojournalism and joined the Black Star agency. After covering New York for a spell, he travelled to India and Latin America to document ways of life whose traditions were at odds with the forces of modernity. He is working on a documentary trilogy called Memories of Underdevelopment, which looks at traditional Caribbean culture and the transition from agrarianism to urban consumer capitalism.
In 2002 a selection from Caña Brava was exhibited in The Open Society's Moving Walls show, and later at CCNY under the auspices of the Dominican Studies Institute. Subsequently, Jon was nominated as a Fellow in Photography by the New York Foundation of the Arts for 2004, and later he presented Memories of Underdevelopment in a multimedia slideshow in conjunction with NYFA and The Dominican Studies Institute. In 2005 The Open Society awarded him their newly inaugurated Documentary Photography Distribution Grant, and he was a finalist for the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize offered by the Center for Documentary Studies. His exhibition, Los Olvidados, toured Santo Domingo and Porte au Prince in 2006, and a subsequent joint exhibition with Walter Astrada is being planned for 2007. The Alicia Patterson Foundation has given Jon a fellowship to continue his work on the sugar plantations, and he will be producing a new multimedia story and website, as well as photographing and writing articles on this theme.
In addition to his photography, Jon is also writing a series of essays and chronicles that relate to his adventures on the island once known as Hispaniola. The essays treat a variety of subjects including sex tourism, death rituals, public transportation, crime, and other cultural and historical matters. some of these appear in Spanish on Trozos de un Viralata and in English on More a Question than a Reply. His essays on photography appear on The Spark of Accident.
He is currently working in Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the subject of Haitian migration, among other things. An article about his work appeared in El Nacional, while El Camino de los Negros has been published in the Aug/sept issue of Geográfica. Some of his tips on photography along with an extensive interview by Wayne Yang appear on Wayne's weblog Eight Diagrams. |
