Berlin

Berlin is Mitch Epstein’s book of photographs of the German capital, made during a six-month residency at the American Academy in Berlin that came with his 2008 Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters.

Epstein’s family is Jewish-American, and many of his relatives died in the Holocaust, so he went to Berlin looking for traces of the Shoah. He did not stop at the Third Reich. Steidl describes the city as a stack of periods laid one over another, and the pictures follow that layering: elephants grazing in Lichtenberg, mannequins with bright white teeth on a billboard at Checkpoint Charlie, the Dalai Lama on a monitor at the Brandenburg Gate. Epstein himself describes the subject as the concrete remnants of Berlin’s war and postwar histories, seen as they mix with present-day life. The book has 72 pages, is clothbound in a slipcase and has English text. Steidl published the first edition in April 2011.

Epstein has photographed the landscape and culture of America for half a century and became a pioneer of 1970s fine-art colour photography. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the Prix Pictet in 2011. Most of his seventeen books are Steidl titles, among them Family Business (2004) and American Power (2009).