Mitch Epstein — Portfolio — Slash Paris

American Power

American Power examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape, and how energy influences American lives. Made on forays to production sites and their environs, these pictures question the power of nature, government, corporations, and mass consumption—as well as the power of looking—in the United States.

Recreation

These photographs, made in the seventies and eighties, offer a window into the breadth of Mitch Epstein’s career. They are highlights from a body of work that goes back forty years. In this early work, the mundane startles, while the extraordinary appears at perfect ease in the world. Teenage girls abandon a baby to fondle a snake; children sleep ass to the wind on a car in an open campground. These photographed rituals of boredom and excess, alienation and possibility, are a distillation of modern America.