Mitch Epstein Livres

Mitch Epstein was 48 and living in New York when his mother called him about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12-year-old boys had broken into a boarded-up apartment building owned by Epstein's father in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and, just for the hell of it, set it ablaze. The fire had spread, engulfing a nineteenth-century Catholic church, then a city block. The $15 million lawsuit brought by the church against the senior Mr. Epstein threatened to unravel his life. Faced with the family crisis, Mitch went home to help, possessed by the question of how his father, once owner of the largest furniture and appliance store in western New England and former Chamber of Commerce Businessman of the Year in 1970, ended up a character out of an Arthur Miller tragedy. What resulted is Family Business, an epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty. It traces the parallel fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital. Epstein has combined formally rigorous, large-scale photographs with fluid video clips to re-create his father's universe. The book's four chapters--"store," "property," "town," "home"--include photographs, storyboards, video stills, archival materials and text, resulting in a mixed-media novel that asks how the American Dream failed his father and his generation of men.

The book presents Mitch Epstein's early photographic journey from 1973 to 1976, capturing the vibrancy of American cities like New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Initially working in black-and-white, he transitioned to color with the encouragement of Garry Winogrand. Featuring previously unseen images, it showcases Epstein's dynamic compositions that reflect the tumultuous era marked by sexual liberation, economic challenges, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, all while balancing his artistic exuberance with formal precision.

In American Power, Mitch Epstein investigates notions of power, both electrical and political. His focus is on energy – how it gets made, how it gets used, and the ramifications of both. From 2003 to 2008, he photographed at and around sites where fossil fuel, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar power are produced in the United States. The resulting photographs contain Epstein’s signature complex wit, surprising detail, and formal rigor. These pictures illuminate the intersection between American society and American landscape. Here is a portrait of early 21st century America, as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible future. In an accompanying essay, Epstein discusses his method, and how making these photographs led him to think harder about the artist’s role in a country teetering between collapse and transformation.

While Mitch Epstein is widely acknowledged as one of the world's most distinguished art photographers, a complete survey of his work has never been published until now. Work invites readers to trace the evolution of Epstein's entire career, following formal and thematic concerns that reveal how his aesthetics, his techniques and his politics have shifted and influenced one another over time. His early work on recreation is given its most natural yet unexpected configuration: Images from the United States are mixed with those from other parts of the world. Each of his major projects cover Common Practice (1973-1989), Vietnam (1992-1995), The City (1995-1998), Family Business (2000-2003), and the current, ongoing American Power. The beginning of each chapter includes a short essay by the artist or an excerpt from his previously published writings. An afterword by Eliot Weinberger and a DVD of Epstein's film Dad round out the package. Many of the pictures here have never before been exhibited or published.

Mitch Epstein's photography presents a nuanced view of Vietnam, capturing its complexities beyond the typical war narratives or idyllic landscapes. His evocative images depict a country that is both disturbing and sublime, revealing layers of history and culture that challenge conventional perceptions. Through his lens, Vietnam emerges as a rich palimpsest, offering a fresh perspective that invites deeper reflection on its multifaceted identity.

Exploring the rituals of excess and alienation in late twentieth-century America, Mitch Epstein's photography reflects a vibrant yet less self-conscious era. This new edition of Recreation features over a third of previously unpublished images, showcasing his unique ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. Epstein's wit and keen observation illuminate the American psyche and landscape, offering a compelling visual narrative that spans half a century and captures the essence of modern life before the digital age.

America, as a place and an idea, has occupied Mitch Epstein’s art for the past five decades. With the first photographs he made in 1969 at 16-years-old, Epstein began confronting the cultural psychology of the United States. Although he started working in an era defined by the Vietnam War, civil rights, rock and roll, and free love, he responded hardily to each radically different era that followed—from Reaganomics to surveillance after 9/11, to the current climate crisis and resurgence of white supremacy. More than a single era or issue, it is the living organism of American culture that engages Epstein; no matter how much the country changes, he describes something mysteriously and persistently American. Conceived of and sequenced by Andrew Roth, Sunshine Hotel assembles 175 photos made between 1969 and 2018—more than half previously unpublished. Yet the book is not simply a retrospective. It traces both the evolution of an artist and the development of a country, revealing Epstein’s formal and thematic shifts in tandem with America’s changing zeitgeist and landscape. Sunshine Hotel is a visual immersion that forgoes linearity and a classical layout, as it sets forth Epstein’s evolving understanding of his country’s pathologies and promise. Co-published with PPP Editions

In his new series, Mitch Epstein investigates the meaning of time by photographing rocks that last millions of years and clouds that evaporate before our eyes. These large-format black-and-white pictures examine society?s complex relationship to nature, a theme Epstein has explored in previous work, including his acclaimed tree pictures (New York Arbor, 2013).0The way the sky and ground can mirror one another intrigued ancient Chinese painters, as well as modern earthwork artists and the Surrealists, all of whom inspired this project. Epstein draws attention to the sculptural quality of New York City?s clouds, bedrock, and architecture?which, at its most elemental, is made from rock. Cloud wedges engulf a cargo ship, buildings recall constructivist paintings, and erratics are imposing elders in the middle of a park or sidewalk. "Rocks and clouds" suggests society?s inability to control time and tame nature. While it seems impossible to make a fresh picture of New York, Epstein gives us a surprising portrait of it.00Exhibition: Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, USA (11.2016-1.2017), Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln, Germany (1.-3.2017).

Mitch Epstein’s new work is a series of photographs of the idiosyncratic trees that inhabit New York City. These pictures underscore the importance of trees to urban life and their complex relationship to their human counterparts. Rooted in New York’s sidewalks, parks, and cemeteries, some trees grow wild, some are contortionists adapting to constrictive surroundings, while others are pruned into prize specimens. As urban development closes in on them, surprisingly, New York’s trees continue to thrive. From 2011 to 2012, Epstein explored New York’s five boroughs in search of remarkable trees, often returning to photograph the same trees through the changing seasons and light. Many of these trees, Epstein learnt, were planted in one context—a farm or nursery, for instance—and had survived to be part of another, a city street or public garden; and most will likely outlive us to find their habitat continue to change. The cumulative effect of these photographs is to invert people’s usual view of their city: trees no longer function as background, but instead dominate the human life and architecture around them.

Mitch Epstein wurde 2008 mit dem 'Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters' ausgezeichnet und von der American Academy für ein halbes Jahr nach Berlin eingeladen. Er folgte diesem Ruf und freute sich darauf, in den ehrwürdigen Hallen der Akademie zu lesen und nachzudenken. Doch daraus wurde nichts: Schon bald trieb es den Fotografen auf die Straßen Berlins, und die Stadt nahm ihn gefangen. Mitch Epstein stammt aus einer jüdisch-amerikanischen Familie. Viele seiner Vorfahren fielen dem Holocaust zum Opfer. So lag es nahe, in Berlin nach den Spuren der Shoah zu suchen. Doch Epstein fokussiert nicht nur auf das 'Dritte Reich'. Er zeigt verschiedene Epochen, die sich in Berlin wie Gesteinsschichten übereinander abgelagert haben. Friedlich weidende Elefanten in Lichtenberg; Mannequins mit strahlend weißen Zähnen auf einer Werbetafel am Checkpoint Charlie; der Dalai Lama auf einem Monitor am Brandenburger Tor – Epstein zeigt Berlins Hang zum Surrealen und gießt menschliches Pathos in komplexe Form.