Mitch Epstein
Old Growth
September 5 – October 19, 2024
Mitch Epstein’s photographs offer a subtle and contemplative approach to a range of critical societal issues within the United States, continuously questioning what it means to be American. From his early pioneering color photographs of American life in the seventies and eighties, to his most recent series focusing on the confluence of nature and human society in New York, Epstein has consistently created formally complex images that result from a highly introspective approach to photography.
In 2003, Epstein began his series American Power, which examines how energy is produced and consumed in the United States. These large-scale color photographs of production sites and their surroundings urge viewers to consider man’s conquest of nature and the power of government, corporations and mass consumption within America. With the black-and-white series New York Arbor (2011-2012) and Rocks and Clouds (2014-2015), Epstein explores similar concerns, narrowing his focus to the five boroughs of New York City. By foregrounding rocks, clouds and trees, Epstein inverts people’s usual view of the city, so that human existence becomes secondary to nature. Primarily working with an 8x10 field camera, Epstein celebrates slow photography in a digital age.
Born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Epstein lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited widely, including at The Noguchi Museum, New York; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art/PS1, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, Paris; and Foam fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, among others. His work has also been collected by major museums, including Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
He has worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Salaam Bombay!, and Mississippi Masala. In 2015, Epstein performed American Power, a theatrical rendition of his photographic series, with cellist Erik Friedlander at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis commissioned and premiered the work in 2013.
Epstein has won numerous awards including the Cooper Union Alumni Association Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award (2023); the Prix Pictet Photography Prize (2010); the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters (2008); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). His books include Sunshine Hotel (2019); Rocks and Clouds (2018); New York Arbor (2013); Berlin (2011); American Power (2009); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (2005); and Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
October 17, 2024 – January 11, 2025
Past as Prologue brings together politically potent historical works from the National Academy’s collection with contemporary works from the National Academy's current community of esteemed National Academicians. The exhibition explores themes of representation of race and indigeneity, political and social commentary, landscape, colonialism, migration, and borders. The first part of the exhibition is focused on landscape and territory. Included artworks depict scenes of grand tours and expeditions in which early Academy members took part, as well as the formation of ideas of the United States abroad, with works depicting colonialism and imperialism and the idea of ‘manifest destiny.’ The second part of Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment is being organized around the theme of identity in relation to political engagement, with artworks that contend with abolitionist movements, national identity including race and indigeneity, protest and political action, social fabric and community, as well as labor.
October 17, 2024 – March 2, 2025
The exhibition brings together photographs of the last twenty years from Mitch Epstein's fundamental series: American Power, Property Rights and Old Growth. The combination of these works tells of the resilience and fragility of the natural world, of the voracious devastation of resources at the hands of American industry and the risks that some reckless individuals assume to preserve what little remains of the pre-colonial lands, so that future generations can also enjoy it.
September 5 – October 19, 2024
Mitch Epstein’s newest series of photographs, Old Growth, continues the artist’s career-long exploration of American culture and the nation’s fraught relationship with the natural world. Old Growth underscores the tension between the medium of photography – the camera can record its subject in a split-second – and the forests depicted, which have potentially infinite lifespans. This oscillation between the instant and the ancient, between human mortality and cosmic perpetuity, resonates through the exhibition. Old Growth articulates the forest’s resilience and fragility, highlighting the need for us to act now to realign our relationship to these precious natural resources. “It is not about how we can save trees,” says Epstein, borrowing from ecologist Suzanne Simard; “It is about how the trees might save us.”
December 13, 2018 – February 24, 2019
Ansel Adams in Our Time
“Ansel Adams in Our Time” brings Adams forward in time, juxtaposing his work with that of contemporary artists such as Mark Klett (born 1962), Trevor Paglen (born 1974), Catherine Opie (born 1961), Abelardo Morell (born 1948), Victoria Sambunaris (born 1964), and Binh Danh (born 1977). The more than 20 present-day photographers in the exhibition have not only been drawn to some of the same locations, but also engaged with many of the themes central to Adams’ legacy: desert and wilderness spaces, Native Americans and the Southwest, and broader issues affecting the environment: logging, mining, drought and fire, booms and busts, development, and urban sprawl.
October 19, 2018 – March 2, 2019
Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South
An unprecedented photography exhibition co-curated by Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mark Long, professor of political science, both of whom are on the faculty of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, Southbound embraces the conundrum of its name. To be southbound is to journey to a place in flux, radically transformed over recent decades, yet also to the place where the past resonates most insistently in the United States. To be southbound is also to confront the weight of preconceived notions about this place, thick with stereotypes, encoded in the artistic, literary, and media records. Southbound engages with and unsettles assumed narratives about this contested region by providing fresh perspectives for understanding the complex admixture of history, geography, and culture that constitutes today’s New South.
September 21, 2018 – January 19, 2019
No Time
No Time builds an imaginary environment inspired by the Moss People sculptures of Finnish contemporary artist Kim Simonsson, complemented by dozens of artworks drawn from the McEvoy Family Collection. Predominant in No Time are historical, modern, and contemporary photographs spanning more than 130 years, including works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Binh Danh, Mitch Epstein, Rodney Graham, Mike and Doug Starn, Carleton Watkins, and Francesca Woodman.
Photographer Mitch Epstein chronicles his journey and career in photography during an interview by Paris Photo.
Mitch Epstein recently collaborated with cellist Erik Friedlander on a limited edition LP based on music composed for a presentation Epstein made last summer at the Arles Photography Festival. Additionally, Epstein and Tate Museum curator Simon Baker will discuss Epstein's photography as a part of the Prix Pictet Conversations on Photography, at Whitechapel Gallery in London on Saturday, May 12 at 4:30 pm.
Mitch Epstein's acclaimed series American Power is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland through November 20. Epstein was awarded the prestigious Prix Pictet Photography Prize for American Power, a series that examines the production and consumption of energy in the United States and its impact on society and the American landscape.
Gallery artists Olivo Barbieri, Mitch Epstein, and Victoria Sambunaris are included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, opening September 24th and running through January 8, 2012.
Mitch Epstein's acclaimed series American Power is currently on display in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, through July 24, and is also included in New Documentary Forms at the Tate Modern in London, through March 31, 2012.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Andrew Moore, Alex Prager, and Victoria Sambunaris are all included in People Power Places: Reframing the American Landscape, a group exhibition at Davidson College, North Carolina, on view through March 6, 2011.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Kenneth Josephson, Laura Letinsky and Hellen van Meene are all included in Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, on display through June 19, 2011. The exhibition also features works by Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vik Muniz, and Richard Misrach, among others.
Photographs by gallery artists Mitch Epstein, Alex Prager, and Bertien van Manen are currently on display in Embarrassment of Riches: Picturing Global Wealth, a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, open through January 2, 2011.
Epstein's latest project tackles one of the most loaded issues on the nation's agenda: what and who powers America? American Power is Epstein's portrait of early twenty-first-century America, as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible and sustainable future.
Mitch Epstein's works Dad, Hampton Ponds III, 2003 and Apartment 304, 398 Main Street, 2001 were recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum are on now on exhibit at the museum in Extended Family: Contemporary Connections. Steidl has also recently released Epstein's 9th monograph, American Power.
