Mark Abramso “Two Face”

United Photo Industries

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Curated by Stacey Clarkson James, Art Director at Harper’s Magazine

“Had some beautiful pictures taken in which I had a big smile on my face. I looked happy, I looked content, I looked like a very nice person, which in theory I am.”
— Donald J. Trump, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.

Never in recent history has the American political landscape felt so polarized.

Two Face explores duplicity and manipulation, fiction and pageantry, production and spectacle in the theater of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

The work is inspired by the artist’s experience of having traveled and performed with a New England circus in his teenage years, and also by images and stories from his regular childhood summer visits with his grandparents in Soviet Russia. Echoing Communist-era propaganda, Two Face brings into focus a blurry a nexus of power, absurdity, and doublespeak.

These images present fragments of reality, but they reside within a space between wakefulness and nightmare. In constructing and deconstructing political dreamscapes, the work—rather than bearing witness—bears intuition and imagination.

About Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson (b. 1988) is a Russian-American freelance photographer and cinematographer based in New York City, working across the U.S and abroad.

His work focuses on the intersection of the various facets of modern day social issues such as immigration, education, politics, and community. Much of the inspiration for his documentary work, and more recent conceptual work Two Face, comes from his own family’s history of migration from the former Soviet Union through Europe and the United States. His interest in experiential storytelling led him to study print journalism at George Washington University, and later to receive further training as a photographer and video journalist at the Washington Post and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

He speaks English, Russian, and Spanish, and his clients include: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, TIME, Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, Arena Magazine, Wired, Newsweek, El Nuevo Día, and Univision.