Mitch Epstein: Sunshine Hotel

Sunshine Hotel gathers 175 of Mitch Epstein’s photographs made between 1969 and 2018 into a portrait of the United States over fifty years, arranged as something other than a straight retrospective.

Andrew Roth conceived and sequenced the book, and more than half of the pictures had not been published before. The sequence is non-linear and has no classical layout, and it shows how Epstein’s formal and thematic choices changed alongside the country’s, from the Vietnam War era through the Reagan years and post-9/11 surveillance to the climate crisis and a resurgence of white supremacy. Epstein took his first photographs in 1969, at sixteen. The book has 264 pages, is clothbound and in English, and was co-published by Steidl and PPP Editions in September 2019.

Epstein has photographed the landscape and culture of America for half a century. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, among other museums, and he was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2020.