Sunshine Hotel, this week’s photobook choice has been conceived and sequenced by Andrew Roth. The book is formed of 175 photographs made between 1969 and 2018, more than half of which are previously unpublished, yet the book is not simply a retrospective.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 Mitch Epstein’s formal and thematic shifts in tandem with America’s changing zeitgeist and landscape. 

America, as a place and an idea, has maintained Mitch Epstein’s art for the past fifty years. With the first photographs he made in 1969 as a 16-year-old, Epstein began confronting the cultural psychology of the US. 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.

A pioneer of 1970s colour photography and for half a century Mitch Epstein has photographed how we engage with our landscape. Epstein has won numerous awards including the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, and in 2013 the Walker Art Center commissioned a theatrical rendition of his ‘American Power’ series. Epstein has conveyed the cultural and physical evolution of the United States from 1973 to the present in his Steidl books ‘Family Business’ [2003], ‘Recreation’ [2005], ‘American Power’ [2011], ‘New York Arbor’ [2013] and Rocks and ‘Clouds’ [2017].

• Mitch Epstein: Sunshine Hotel
• Editor: Andrew Roth
• 264 pages
• 12.25 x 12 in. / 31 x 30.5cm
• Four-colour process
• Hardback/Clothbound
• €68.00
• ISBN 978-3-95829-609-1
• Release date: November 19, 2019