American Power
Mitch Epstein's American Power turns a large-format camera on the machinery that keeps the country running, catching the plain, almost bureaucratic look of infrastructure most people are trained not to see.
Working mainly with a view camera between 2003 and 2008, Epstein traveled the United States photographing sixty-four color pictures at coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar sites. The project began as a New York Times Magazine assignment after he covered the evacuation of Cheshire, Ohio, a town contaminated by a nearby coal plant, and grew into a five-year survey of energy production and its costs. He was repeatedly stopped by corporate security guards and once questioned by the FBI for photographing power plants from public roads, an episode recounted in the book's afterword. Steidl published American Power in 2009 as a 144-page clothbound book; it won a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis gold medal in 2010.
Epstein has spent five decades photographing American landscapes and social life, beginning with work on Mike Nichols and Robert Altman film sets in the 1970s. American Power extended concerns he pursued in Family Business and later returned to in Property Rights and Old Growth, both likewise built around land use and its consequences.
