Mitch Epstein

With Old Growth, American photographer Mitch Epstein invites readers into a diverse transcontinental forest that includes white pines, hemlocks, sequoias, moss-covered cedars, bald cypresses and bristlecone pines that have survived for millennia. The book explores the enigma of time, while also evoking the forests’ historical struggle to survive American expansionism. Over the past 500 years, Americans have destroyed more than 95 percent of the original forests in the United States. Yet, these are indispensable in the fight against climate change—large, old trees hold significantly more carbon than replanted saplings.
Old Growth highlights the astounding diversity, interdependence and sculptural beauty of America’s ancient forests. Made with an 8×10 camera in color and black and white, Epstein’s images convey nuances of the forest that people cannot normally see, in the hope that gaining proximity to these epic, life-giving trees could inspire us to protect them. To borrow from ecologist Suzanne Simard, this book is not simply about how we can save trees; it is about how the trees might save us.
Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century. A pioneer of color photography in the 1970s, Epstein was inducted into the National Academy of Design and awarded the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the summer of 1999, two boys barely in their teens were so bored that they started a fire in a boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The fire spread and engulfed an entire city block. Mitch Epstein’s father owned the building and was sued for $15 million, which he didn’t have. Epstein’s father also owned a once successful furniture store that now faced liquidation. Family Business is an epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty. It traces the fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital in four chapters: “Store,” “Property,” “Town” and “Home.” As Andy Grundberg wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “This book elegantly and eloquently traces the decline of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a once prosperous industrial town, through the poignant example of Mitch Epstein’s own family’s declining fortunes and psychological disintegration.”
Surprising, hard-hitting and haunting, the book includes photographs, video storyboards and stills, interviews and dialogues. In Family Business, Epstein has invented a unique mixed-media novel whose conceptual ambitions are matched by its fearless humanity. This is the 20th anniversary edition of a seminal photobook, which quickly became a model of complex visual storytelling.

In 1995, renowned American photographer Mitch Epstein (born 1952) began making pictures in New York City as it underwent a seismic cultural and physical shift. The gritty neighborhoods and sassy unselfconsciousness of the 1970s, when Epstein had first moved to New York, were disappearing. Signs of the future were encroaching: surveillance cameras, the normalization of gun violence as a virtual reality game in Times Square and Disney’s gentrification of the old theaters and strip clubs on 42nd Street. As a seasoned documentarian of the American landscape and psyche, Epstein set out to photograph the streets and public spaces of New York in this strange liminal space, between past and future. A year into the project, he also began making black-and-white portraits of his inner circle in their homes or workspaces as an intimate counterpoint to his color photographs of street life. A Language of New York examines the city’s recurrent self-cannibalizing into a new upcycled landscape and the urban relationship between public and private. Both gimlet-eyed inquiry and loving homage, it describes an incredibly resilient city prone to cooperation, protest, consumerism and creativity in the extremes.

Between the 1970s and ’90s, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) photographed the rituals of excess and alienation, jubilance and desire that defined late 20th-century America. These pictures marked the beginning of his photographic inquiry into the American psyche and landscape that has now lasted half a century. Recreation captures the vitality of modern America in a pre-smartphone, less self-conscious time. In these early works, Epstein’s wit reigns, along with his singular way of making the mundane startle and the extraordinary appear to perfectly fit in.
This new edition expands on the original Recreation book published by Steidl in 2005. More than a third of these photographs have never been published, and all of them have been reworked with fidelity to the pictorial quality of the films of the era.

Between 1973 and ’76, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) photographed in American cities—New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, among others. He was initially shooting in black and white as a student of Garry Winogrand, when he asked his teacher, “Why not color?” With Winogrand’s blessing, Epstein shot his first rolls of Kodachrome. Silver + Chrome is a chronicle of his three years alternating between color and black and white, before eventually committing to color.
This book contains Epstein’s earliest work, virtually none of which has been seen before. In these kinetic tableaux, the artist’s exuberance is tamed, just barely, by his formal intelligence. He depicts American city life as it undergoes taboo-shattering sexual liberation, economic crises and the repercussions of a boondoggle war in Vietnam, immersing us in the urban chaos of this complicated time.

A New York Times Book Review 2021 holiday gift guide pick

Epstein began his latest series in 2017 at Standing Rock, where thousands protested the installation of the Dakota Access Pipeline on Sioux land. Over four years, he charted other contested lands from Pennsylvania and Hawaii to the Mexican border, as well as land loss through wildfires and flooding due to egregious environmental negligence.

In keeping with Epstein’s 50-year exploration of American life, Property Rights questions the relationship between institutions, civil rights and the rights of nature itself. Acknowledging our bodies and lives as our most fundamental property, the book examines other forms of trespass and destruction in an elegy to the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, and in photographs of Black Lives Matter protests during COVID-19. Property Rights includes the voices of activists Epstein interviewed while making this deeply personal and political work. In a time of alarming division, the book describes diverse communities in a common fight against politicians and plutocrats willing to sacrifice the people’s well-being.

A pioneer of 1970s art photography, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century. Numerous collections hold his work, including the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern; in 2013, the Walker Art Center commissioned a theatrical rendition of his American Power series. Epstein has described the cultural and physical evolution of the United States from 1973 to 2019 in his Steidl books Family Business (2003), Recreation (2005), American Power (2011), New York Arbor (2013), Rocks and Clouds (2017) and Sunshine Hotel (2019).

A New York Times Book Review 2021 holiday gift guide pick

Between 1978 and 1989, Mitch Epstein made eight trips to India and shot tens of thousands of photographs. He also made three films there with his Indian wife, director Mira Nair. The photographs in this book are the result of Epstein’s unusual dual vantage in an extraordinarily complicated culture: through his Indian family life and work, he was both an insider and outsider. Epstein was able to enter a wide swath of subcultures that included a striptease cabaret, the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, Bollywood movie sets, an old-time Punjabi wedding band and religious pilgrims both Muslim and Hindu. In India is the fruit of Epstein’s deep and extended experience of India, where separate worlds converged.
A pioneer of 1970s art photography, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century. His awards include the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was recently inducted into the National Academy of Design. Numerous collections hold his work, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern; in 2013, the Walker Art Center commissioned a theatrical rendition of his American Power series. Epstein has described the cultural and physical evolution of the United States from 1973 to 2021 in his Steidl books Family Business (2003), Recreation (2005), American Power (2011), New York Arbor (2013), Rocks and Clouds (2017), Sunshine Hotel (2019) and Property Rights (2021).

A New York Times Book Review 2019 holiday gift guide pick

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 the age of 16, 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 of them 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.

A pioneer of 1970s color photography, Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has won numerous awards including the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, and in 2013 the Walker Art Center commissioned a theatrical rendition of his American Power series. His Steidl books include Family Business (2003), Recreation (2005), American Power (2011), New York Arbor (2013) and Rocks and Clouds (2017).