Mitch Epstein’s Urgent Look at Communities Vying for American Land | The New Yorker

At the beginning of this decade, the photographer Mitch Epstein spent two years taking pictures of trees. He had just published the book “American Power,” an epic study of the energy industry—from its corporate sanctums to its impact on everyday lives and landscapes—for which he travelled to twenty-five states in the course of five years. The trees were in New York City, where Epstein has been based since the early nineteen-seventies, but it wasn’t just that he wanted to stay close to home after being peripatetic. Before embarking on his journey for “American Power,” Epstein had immersed himself in a deeply personal project about the unravelling of his father’s business in Massachusetts—a lament for the vanishing American Dream and a concession that that dream was corrosive. In trees, Epstein believed he had found a subject that, as he wrote, he could “honor rather than mourn.”