Mitch Epstein: Property Rights

Document Journal

Clara Malley

Land, dignity, and ethics: Mitch Epstein photographs the remnants of our American Dream.

New Yorker

Andrea K. Scott

Magnificent images [...] reflects pressing issues ranging from immigration to our threatened environment.

Aperture

Rebecca Bengal

Property Rights, though it focuses mostly on threatened landscapes, is part of an established trajectory mapped out over decades of work ...an anachronistic sequence that heightens the connections between new and archival photographs.

Art & Object

Property Rights is a vivid series of large-format photographs made across the United States. In an era largely defined by issues of citizenship, immigration, and environmental degradation, Epstein frames the land itself as a charged site of both discord and unity.

Art in America

Eric Sutphin

Foregrounds the tension between sublime American landscapes and corporate agendas…. Epstein’s images remind the viewer that resistance movements can endure longer than the news cycles covering them, and many individuals completely restructure their ways of life in order to stand up for their beliefs.

Forbes: Media

Chadd Scott

Documents many of the most contentious sites in recent American history, capturing environments of protest, discord and unity. [Property Rights showcases] the majesty of America’s natural landscape with its fraught history of claimed ownership, prompting pressing yet enduring questions of power, individualism and equity.

Juxtapoz

Politics and citizenship, or environmental degradation and land rights, Epstein focuses on tough topics, helping us see overlapping, and often competing, histories and perspectives.

Blind

Miss Rosen

Explores the illusory nature of the American Dream and the role of resistance against the powers that be.

Forbes: Media

Brienne Walsh

The book makes a powerful argument that returning to a more collective concept of our place in nature may be the only solution towards saving this tenuous place that we call our 'nation'.

Hyperallergic

Lauren Moya Ford

A stark but sensitive examination of American life and land under the Trump administration ... A gut-wrenching but graceful project.

New York Times

Lucy Sante

His photographs are always lucid and eloquent, and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects. There is no empty rhetoric here.

Conscientious Photo

Jorg M. Colberg

It’s one thing to profess one’s concern for urgent issues; but it’s quite another to travel to so many hot spots to put the one tool one knows well to as good a use as possible. Property Rights is an overtly political book by a member of a generation that has often shied away from making political work (even as they might loudly profess their admiration for books like Robert Frank’s The Americans). I think the creation of this book is a very important statement on its own.