Mitch Epstein: Psychogram of a Nation

"Those conversations and the real righteousness of those voices stayed with me and enabled me to begin to think in a more extended way about how compelling and challenging it would be to do a piece about land in America that would hopefully bring about some new way of looking at it, this notion of who are we to think we can claim ownership of land?"

"I realized that power was like a Russian nesting doll. Each time I opened one kind of power, I found another kind inside. When I opened electrical power, I discovered political power; when I opened political power, I discovered corporate power; within corporate was consumer; within consumer was civic; within civic was religous, and so on, one type of power enabling the next. I began making these pictures with the idea that an artist lives outside of the nesting doll, and simply opens and examines it. But now - while America teeters betwen collapse and transformation - I see it differently; as an artist, I sit outside, but also within, exerting my own power."

"What I witnessed when I went home during the crisis was about much more than my father. It was about the town and an American way of life that was disappearing, and so I felt I could do this without succumbing to sentimentality. As troubled as the world around me is, though, it’s still extraordinarily beautiful and holds the promise of change and justice. I am acutely aware of nature’s inherent beauty and transformative power. I’ve worked to finesse a pictorial strategy where beauty is often a foil for terror."

 "I think that in photography, the most surprising and thrilling pictures are often the ones that are made out of nothing."