A photographer travels the world in order to document the remaining vestiges of world’s fairs across the globe, while searching for balance between being an artist and raising a family.

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.
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, 4x5-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.
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.

“By seeking out what remains of these once-dramatic sites of national fanfare, what emerges in the pictures is a vision of incongruous juxtapositions tinged with sadness, yet we often find laughter. There is now a significant debate over whether these fairs lead to any benefits for the host city and what is to be made of the sites once the fair has closed. Doskow’s images make a vivid critique of the idea, taking into consideration the whole legacy of these sites over more than 150 years. Her pictures leave the debate evenly balanced, and she observes the gradual decline of the fundamental validity of the world’s fairs concept with a detached but illuminating gaze.”

— RICHARD PARE, Photographer

Lost Utopias_img1.jpg — “The photographs of ‘Lost Utopias’ not only provide valuable documentation of surviving artifacts and living landscapes, but provoke further questioning... Do the ghosts of fairs past haunt us or does their spirit inspire us? Are there lost utopias we might wish to reclaim?”
— JENNIFER MINNER, Associate Professor at Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning Department