Family Business

Family Business is Mitch Epstein's book about his father, the collapse of the family furniture store and real estate business, and the decline of Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Steidl's account starts in the summer of 1999, when two boys barely in their teens set fire to a boarded-up building in Holyoke that Epstein's father owned. The blaze took a whole city block, and his father was sued for 15 million dollars while the furniture store he also owned faced liquidation. The book answers with photographs, video stills, storyboards and dialogues, in four chapters titled Store, Property, Town and Home. Epstein's website places it inside a multimedia project that also includes video, archival material, interviews and a personal essay. It has 300 pages and is a clothbound hardcover in English.

Epstein has photographed the landscape and culture of America for half a century and was a pioneer of 1970s colour fine-art photography. He graduated from Cooper Union and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002), the Berlin Prize (2008) and the Prix Pictet (2011).