Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein was born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town on the Connecticut River whose industrial history would prove unexpectedly relevant to the work that would define his career decades later. His father ran a furniture store in the city, and Epstein grew up surrounded by the textures of a declining New England manufacturing economy. He studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Cooper Union in New York, where he was influenced by the teaching of Garry Winogrand and the example of colour photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who were then in the process of establishing colour as a legitimate medium for serious art photography.

Epstein's early work in the 1970s and 1980s placed him squarely within the emerging tradition of New Colour photography. His series Recreation, begun in 1973, explored American leisure culture with a keen eye for the absurdity and beauty of ordinary people at play — sunbathers, swimmers, amusement parks, and beaches rendered in the saturated hues that became his signature. Unlike the snapshot aesthetic of Eggleston or the deadpan frontality of Shore, Epstein's approach combined formal precision with a warmth of observation that gave his subjects a dignity that avoided both sentimentality and irony.

In the early 1980s, Epstein travelled extensively in India, producing a body of work that marked a significant departure from the American subjects of his earlier career. His Indian photographs, collected in In Pursuit of India, brought the same chromatic sensitivity to the subcontinent's overwhelming visual density — markets, temples, construction sites, and domestic interiors rendered with a clarity that avoided the exoticising tendencies of much Western photography in the developing world. The experience of working in India expanded Epstein's sense of what a photograph could contain, and the visual complexity of those images would inform his later, more politically engaged American work.

The project that would establish Epstein as one of the most important American photographers of his generation began in 2003. American Power originated from a personal encounter with energy politics: a power company proposed building a generating station near his father's property in Holyoke, and the resulting conflict drew Epstein's attention to the vast, largely invisible infrastructure of energy production that sustains American life. Over the next five years, he travelled across the country photographing coal-fired power plants, nuclear cooling towers, wind farms, oil platforms, and the communities that live in their shadow.

The images in American Power are monumental in scale and devastating in their quiet clarity. Epstein worked with a large-format 8x10 camera, producing prints of extraordinary detail and chromatic richness. A coal plant rises behind a suburban backyard where a woman hangs laundry. Wind turbines march across a golden California hillside. A nuclear cooling tower looms over a Little League baseball game. The juxtapositions are never forced or polemical; Epstein trusts the descriptive power of the photograph to make the argument, and the effect is all the more powerful for its restraint.

Following American Power, Epstein turned his attention to New York City with a series of projects that examined the metropolis with the same combination of formal rigour and social conscience. New York Arbor documented the city's trees — those resilient organisms that persist amid concrete and steel, their roots buckling sidewalks, their canopies filtering the light of skyscrapers. Rocks and Clouds extended this engagement with nature in the urban environment, finding in geological and meteorological forms a counterpoint to the built landscape.

Epstein's more recent work, including Property Rights, has continued to explore the tensions between public and private space, between individual liberty and collective responsibility, that run through all of his mature photography. His images of contested landscapes — border walls, surveillance installations, gated communities, and public lands under threat — constitute a sustained meditation on the meaning of ownership in a democratic society. Throughout his career, Epstein has demonstrated that colour photography, far from being merely decorative, can serve as a powerful instrument of political and environmental witness.