Mitch Epstein

From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in an exhibition of this work at Wooster Gardens in New York, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. Reviewing an exhibition of the Vietnam pictures for Art in America, Peter von Ziegesar writes, "In a show full of small pleasures, little prepares one for the stunning epiphany contained in Perfume Pagoda…Few photographers have managed to make an image so loaded and so beautiful at once."[7]

Having lived and traveled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in New York City. His 1999 series The City investigated the relationship between public and private life in New York. Reviewing The City exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, Vince Aletti wrote that the pictures "[are] as assured as they are ambitious."[8]

In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father's two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by Epstein. The book, Family Business, which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Kraszna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award.[2] In reviewing the book, Nancy Princenthal wrote in Art in America that "his patiently plotted bell curve" of the history of the family business "is worthy of Dreiser".[9]

From 2004 to 2009, Epstein investigated energy production and consumption in the United States, photographing in and around various energy production sites. This series, titled American Power, questions the meaning and make-up of power—electrical and political. Epstein made a monograph of the American Power pictures (2009), in which he wrote that he was often stopped by corporate security guards and once interrogated by the FBI for standing on public streets and pointing his camera at energy infrastructure.[10] The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide.

In his Art in America review, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein "grounds his images…in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty."[11] In an essay for the catalogue Contemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection: Appropriated Landscapes (2011), Brian Wallis wrote,

"Epstein has made clear that his intention is neither to illustrate political events nor to create persuasive propaganda. Rather, he raises the more challenging question of how inherently abstract political concepts about the nation and the culture as a whole can be represented photographically…But equally significant is the unique form of documentary storytelling that he has invented in American Power—colorful, sweeping, concerned, intimate, honest."[12]

In The New York Times, Martha Schwendener wrote:

"What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein's ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography. He utilizes the supersize scale and saturated color of conceptualism, and his odd, implied narratives strongly recall the work of artists like Jeff Wall."[13]

In 2009, Epstein collaborated with his second wife, author Susan Bell, on a public art project and website based on American Power. The What Is American Power? project used billboards, transportation posters, and a website to "inspire and educate people about environmental issues."[4]

In 2013, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis commissioned Epstein and cellist Erik Friedlander to create a theatrical performance of American Power, which premiered at the Walker and, in 2015, traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Created in collaboration with directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, this theatrical rendition of Epstein's photographic series combines projected photographs, archival material, video, music, and storytelling.

In 2008, Epstein won the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin.[14] Awarded a 6-month residency, he moved to Berlin with his wife and daughter from January–June 2008. The photographs he made there of significant historical sites were published in the monograph Berlin (2011).

For his New York trilogy, New York Arbor and Rocks and Clouds, Epstein photographed the city's trees, rocks, and clouds with an 8×10 view camera and black and white film to depict the interplay between society and nature.[15][16] "Epstein's trees extend the photographer's longstanding interest in mankind's disruption of our environment," writes Rob Slifkin,[17] "...his new work typically addresses this theme of human engagement with nature without recourse to the inclusion of actual people. Instead it is the way the human environment clumsily perches itself upon and amidst the natural world that defines Epstein's approach to landscape."