<p>Knives is an elegy for American manufacturing made over several years, using photography to trace the shifting relationships between masculinity, myth, and violence in a rural town whose economic base remains eviscerated by globalisation. The cutlery industry formed the economic backbone of New York s Hudson Valley for over 150 years, until the Schrade knife factory abruptly moved production to China in 2004, leaving 700 men and women out of work. The town s maximum security prison, Eastern Correctional Facility, became the largest employer in the area, shielded from the wider community by layers of secrecy. As businesses continued to close during the decade that followed, drug abuse, mental disorders, and rare cancers have become more widespread. Knives operates as two intertwined stories: one, a typological study of knives crafted in the region since the rise of the cutlery industry, provides connective tissue to the other, which deals in the realities of the local community, both within the prison and without. The project serves as a microcosm of the larger issues facing the United States, grappling with the effects of automation and outsourcing, cuts in services, and the rise of identity politics.</p>

Knives

Arts & Photography

Jason Koxvold

Photography & Video

Gnomic Book

<p>Calle Tredici Martiri (Alley of the Thirteen Martyrs) is a fictionalised photographic reinterpretation of Koxvold's grandfather Aldo Varisco's campaign of direct action against the Nazi occupation of Italy. The book is comprised of 144 pages of Koxvold's photographs and 80 pages of Varisco's memoirs of the resistance, and archival imagery. The book's title refers to the location of the Venetian headquarters of the National Republican Guard at Ca' Giustinian, which Varisco's team destroyed with explosives in 1944, killing 13. The following day, the German military shot 13 Italian prisoners in retribution for the attack; Varisco and his team were later captured and extensively tortured. After the war, the street alongside Ca' Giustinian was renamed "Calle Tredici Martiri." Today, the United States is involved in the longest war in the nation's history, fought against nebulous and invisible terrorists with yet no end in sight. This project explores the impossibility of photographic truth in the context of the contemporary nexus of capitalism, fascism and consumerism within which we locate ourselves. Ca' Giustinian is today the site of the offices of the Venice Biennale.</p>

Calle Tredici Martiri

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Ryan Debolski

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Books by Jason Koxvold