Tag: Mitch Epstein

A Gut-Wrenching but Graceful Photo Project on Trump’s America

Over four tumultuous years, Epstein’s book moves across the country to capture pivotal points of conflict between the American government, the people, and the land.

Mitch Epstein’s book Property Rights (Steidl) is a stark but sensitive examination of American life and land under the Trump administration. Over four tumultuous years, Epstein’s book moves across the country — from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to the US-Mexico border to the streets of New York City — to capture pivotal points of conflict between the American government, the people, and the land. Property Rights pairs Epstein’s detailed, dignified photos of activists and their actions with selections from his interviews with protesters, humanitarians, and environmentalists. Epstein’s gut-wrenching but graceful project urgently exposes the grave stakes we face today, while also reminding us that our current turbulent moment has precedents in earlier American history.

Mitch Epstein’s Urgent Look at Communities Vying for American Land

One of the great accomplishments of Epstein’s new work is how he makes headline-grabbing subjects feel timeless.

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.”

LightBox | Time

Read the latest stories about LightBox on Time

TIME LightBox presents a new monthly round-up of the best books, exhibitions and ways to experience photography beyond the web—from the Reportage Photography Festival in Sydney and a new Mitch Epstein book to Martin Parr’s ‘Life’s a Beach’ at Aperture in New York and an André Kertész show in London.

Mitch Epstein, Tree Stalker

The photographer goes into detail about his process for selecting and shooting the arboreal landmarks featured in our Voyages Issue.

Before bringing the 8-by-10 camera, I photographed the tree several times with a little digital camera. I spent time with the tree. It was January, and I first had to educate myself as to when the light would be at a favorable vantage point in the sky.

LightBox | Time

Read the latest stories about LightBox on Time

On Thursday, Prix Pictet named Mitch Epstein’s American Power, a stunning series on fossil fuels and renewable energy use in the U.S. this year’s winner of the group’s third photography prize for environmental sustainability. The theme of this year’s competition was growth, which correlated with Prix Pictet’s mission to “search for photographs that communicate powerful messages of global environmental significance.”

Capturing a Nation’s Thirst for Energy

The photographer Mitch Epstein routinely came under suspicion while taking pictures of dams and power plants for his new book, “American Power.”

The photographer Mitch Epstein, thin and professorial with gray hair and glasses, does not exactly cut a menacing figure. When he ducks beneath the dark cloth of his 8-by-10 view camera, the words that come most readily to mind are late Victorian, not potentially violent.