Mitch Epstein on capturing the real America for 50 years
- Text by Miss Rosen
- Photography by Mitch Epstein
The year was 1969, and America was ablaze, fired up by protests against the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and Stonewall. Photographer Mitch Epstein, then just 16 years old, began to use his camera to confront the complex cultural psychology of the country he called home.
Over the next 50 years, he would amass an archive of work that stands alone as single images, works beautifully as photo essays, and reveals the country’s complexities, contradictions and conflicts.
In his masterful new book, Sunshine Hotel (Steidl), Epstein weaves a mesmerising tapestry of American life that speaks powerfully of who and where we are now. The 175 photographs in the book, sequenced by editor Andrew Roth, raise questions while simultaneously revealing the nuances of the national character.
“The book demands and deserves to be read,” Epstein says. “You have to give yourself to it and then you get something back and that’s what art should be. I don’t know that it’s ever meant to be fully understood in terms of its meaning. It’s not about that. It’s more visceral in some way.”
Sunshine Hotel looks at American history without the nostalgia that makes us long for a simpler time, while illustrating William Faulker’s dictum: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet the book is not didactic: it is everything America purports to be: open, embracing, accepting, and validating of multiple perspectives simultaneously.
A powerful sense of realism that pervades the work underscoring a sense of knowing that Epstein’s eye has always held. “There’s a kind of madness that’s this undercurrent that’s always been there in the American landscape,” Epstein says.
“We’re at a point of deep division and things spinning out of control but a lot of has been kept under wraps. It’s always been there but it’s just more accelerated now because there’s more pressure on all the resources, which are being depleted.”
Yet Epstein is not a pessimist. For all its painful truths, Sunshine Hotel is a letter of hope, a belief that goodwill perseveres. “The saving grace of my work is it’s not explaining itself; it’s enabling beauty. I think within beauty there is a kind of hope, a glimmer of optimism.”
“These are times in which we all have to be bold as artists, as citizens, as human beings. My pictures are a tool I can use to create perspective on the complexity of these things without surrendering them to the ideas I have got floating in my head.”
Ultimately, Sunshine Hotel is a noble lesson on the importance of putting the subject first while respecting the journey and the work – and always staying present, flexible, and open to how to transmit the experience of witnessing through the photograph.
Follow Miss Rosen on Twitter.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Latest on Huck
In Photos: A decade growing up in pre-gentrification Lower East Side
A new photobook provides an up-close-and-personal look at the life of a Puerto Rican family, documenting them growing up as the world changed around them.
Written by: Isaac Muk
This summer taught us everything is... marketing
Months of historic political violence, memes, auras, and, of course, ‘brat’ has newsletter columnist Emma Garland asking if anything is real anymore?
Written by: Emma Garland
Rick Castro’s intimate portraits of love and remembrance
Columbarium Continuum is an ongoing exhibition of photographs displayed inside the two-story art nouveau columbarium of the iconic Hollywood Forever cemetery.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The disabled Flâneur forcing us to rethink our cities
This perspective-shifting short film follows Phil Waterworth, the wheelchair-bound urban explorer confronting a lack of accessibility in cities like Sheffield.
Written by: Alex King
Chronicling conflict and survival in the Democratic Republic of Congo
A new photo exhibition documents how a brutal conflict on the eastern edge of the country continues to devastate the lives of civilians.
Written by: Miss Rosen
A playful look at Gen X teens coming of age in 1980s America
After fleeing Pinochet, Sergio Purtell created a photographic love letter to the people of his adopted home with the knowing eye of one who has seen their homeland fall to fascism.
Written by: Miss Rosen