I first became familiar with Jonathan Blaustein’s work in 2009 when we met at Center Santa Fe’s portfolio review. While I was first excited by our comically similar names, his series The Value of a Dollar grabbed me for its direct stripping-down of food as a commodity, a source of nourishment and symbol of wealth, power, health, and inequality in the 21st century.

For more than a decade, and across multiple series, Blaustein has mixed this deadpan simplicity with bits of humor and earnestness to critique, poke fun at, and highlight the impact of consumerism and throwaway culture on the environment and society at large. His latest series Party City is the Devil continues this trajectory with garishly bright, poppy, typology-meets-Warhol inspired photographs. Red mime masks, cardboard crowns, shoddily-inflated ballons, and other useless party gags sit on disposable-tablecloths-turned-studio-backdrops. Using available light to mimic their no-frills essence, Blaustein’s photographs make bare the absurdity of the most disposable cultural items – the plastic crap we so readily buy and toss from stores like Party City.

I spoke with Blaustein, smack in the middle of his Kickstarter campaign to fund Extinction Party, a photobook culminating Blaustein's many projects, which Yoffy Press will (if you, dear readers, help fund it) publish in 2020.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Jonathan Blaustein