“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 Abramson’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 nexus of power, absurdity, and doublespeak.

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

Mark Abramson (b. 1988) is a Russian-American freelance photographer and filmmaker based in New York City.

I am drawn to telling stories that allow me to pass through a window and enter into subjects’ lives and document their existence and experiences. Much of my desire to cover issues concerning immigration and other social issues come from the fabric of my family history and its migration from the former Soviet Union and how that has enabled me to work with my camera. My interest in exploring reporting led me to study print journalism at the George Washington University, which then led me to receive more formal training as a photographer and video journalist at the Washington Post and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I am an English, Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew speaker and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. My published work and other clients also include: The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, Getty Images, GOOD Magazine, Newsweek, Arena Magazine, International Herald Tribune, National Geographic (Food), El Nuevo Día.