Join thousands of book lovers
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.You can, at any time, unsubscribe from our newsletters.
Between the 1970s and '90s, 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. Recreation captures the vitality of modern America in a pre-smartphone, less self-conscious time. In these early works, Epstein's wit reigns, along with his singular way of making the mundane startle and the extraordinary appear to perfectly fit in.This new edition expands on the original Recreation book published by Steidl 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.
America, as a place and an idea, has occupied Mitch Epstein's art for the past five decades. With the first photographs he made in 1969 at 16-years-old, Epstein began confronting the cultural psychology of the United States. Although he started working in an era defined by the Vietnam War, civil rights, rock and roll, and free love, he responded hardily to each radically different era that followed-from Reaganomics to surveillance after 9/11, to the current climate crisis and resurgence of white supremacy. More than a single era or issue, it is the living organism of American culture that engages Epstein; no matter how much the country changes, he describes something mysteriously and persistently American.Conceived of and sequenced by Andrew Roth, Sunshine Hotel assembles 175 photos made between 1969 and 2018-more than half previously unpublished. Yet the book is not simply a retrospective. It traces both the evolution of an artist and the development of a country, revealing Epstein's formal and thematic shifts in tandem with America's changing zeitgeist and landscape. Sunshine Hotel is a visual immersion that forgoes linearity and a classical layout, as it sets forth Epstein's evolving understanding of his country's pathologies and promise. Co-published with PPP Editions
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.