EPSTEIN, Mitch - Recreation

Background information

"Between the 1970s and 1990s, US photographer Mitch EPSTEIN photographed the rituals of excess and alienation, jubilance and desire that defined late twentieth-century America. These pictures marked the beginning of his photographic inquiry into the American psyche and landscape that has now lasted half a century. They also offer a window onto the beginning and breadth of the career of Mitch EPSTEIN. In 2005, most of these photographs were previously unpublished - culled from a body of work that goes back thirty years. Ordinary things here startle, 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. People stake their private ground in public, if only for a moment - during which the camera of Mitch EPSTEIN finds them. Gesture gives many of these pictures their pulse. Tender hand, strained shoulder, swiveled hip. It isn't the fact of thirteen year olds smoking that shocks, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes. His sharp wit is laced with compassion. He has turned these rituals of boredom and beauty, excess and denial, alienation and possibility, into no less than a distillation of modern America.

Content

The photo volume 'Recreation' by Mitch EPSTEIN captures the vitality of modern America in a pre-smartphone, less self-conscious time. In these early works, his wit reigns, along with his singular way of making the mundane startle and the extraordinary appear to perfectly fit in. 

About the new edition

This new edition of 'Recreation' expands on the original book published in 2005. More than a third of these photographs have never been published, and all of them have been re-worked with fidelity to the pictorial quality of the films of the era." (© Steidl Verlag, 2022)

About US-American photographer, Mitch EPSTEIN (b.1952)

Photo books by and with works by Mitch EPSTEIN