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Throughout his four decade career, Mitch Epstein has examined the cultural psychology of the United States, revealing America as both a place and an idea. From his early pioneering color photographs of American life in the seventies and eighties, to his recent series focusing on the confluence of nature and human society, Epstein has consistently created formally and conceptually complex images resulting from a highly sophisticated and nuanced approach to photography.
Below is a selection of iconic images from four of Epstein’s major color series: Property Rights (2019), American Power (2009), Family Business (2003) and Recreation: American Photographs (1973 - 1988). -
Mitch EpsteinStanding Rock Prayer Walk, North Dakota, 2018Chromogenic Print25 x 33 inchesEdition of 6 + 2 APsPROPERTY RIGHTS
In his most recent body of work Property Rights, Mitch Epstein probes the fissures in a flawed national narrative about citizenship, land rights and human freedoms. The photographs pose questions about the definition of property, and the relationship between humans and natural land. In an era roiled by issues of human rights and environmental degradation, Epstein frames the American landscape as a site of both discord and unity, a psychogram of a troubled nation.
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"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?"
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Mitch EpsteinMount Rushmore National Memorial, Six Grandfathers, South Dakota, 2018Chromogenic Print45 x 58 inchesEdition of 6 + 2 APs
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Mitch EpsteinGreen Mountain Wind Farm, Fluvana, Texas, 2005Chromogenic Print45 x 58 inchesEdition of 6 + 2 APs
AMERICAN POWER
American Power (2009) examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape, and how energy influences American lives. Made on forays to production sites and their environs, these pictures question the power of nature, government, corporations, and mass consumption—as well as the power of looking—in the United States.
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Mitch EpsteinPoca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia, 2004Chromogenic Print
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"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."
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FAMILY BUSINESS
Family Business (2003) is a multimedia project about disillusionment and broken American dreams, rendered as an epic drama surrounding Epstein's father and the demise of the family furniture store and real estate business. The project captures the psychological tensions implicit in a family business bankruptcy, and resonates as a metaphor for the demise of many post-industrial American towns where small businesses and the main street they comprise have shuttered in the face of mega-coporations, big box stores, and the internet.
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"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."
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Mitch EpsteinApartment 304, 398 Main Street 2001, 2000Chromogenic Print30 x 40 inchesEdition of 10 + 3 APs
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"I think that in photography, the most surprising and thrilling pictures are often the ones that are made out of nothing."
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Mitch EpsteinWest Side Highway, New York City, 1977Chromogenic Print28 x 42 inchesEdition of 5 + 3 APs
Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988
Recreation, made in the seventies and eighties, offers a window into the beginning and breadth of Mitch Epstein's career. Ordinary things here startle, while the extraordinary appears at perfect ease in the world. Epstein's sharp wit is laced with compassion and a poetic sensibility. He has turned rituals of boredom and beauty, excess and denial, alienation and possibility, into a distillation of modern America.
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Mitch EpsteinCocoa Beach I, Florida, 1983Chromogenic Print20 x 24 inchesEdition of 10 + 3 APs
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Born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Epstein lives and works in New York City. His photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth will present a solo exhibition of Property Rights in December 2020.
Mitch Epstein: Psychogram of a Nation
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