Illuminations

text by Robert Goethals, photography by Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein. Mirror Shop, Hanoi 1995 JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

Mitch Epstein grew up at the crossroads. Back in the Day, in mobbed-up Providence, Rhode Island, undergraduate zit-squeezing life at the Rhode Island School of Design was a heady, glorious, tongue-probing swirl. 18year-old painting provocateurs penetrated the impenetrable mysteries of

cobalt blue, young architects tossed typologies and topologies in blenders, and photography students, like Mitch Epstein, witnessed black-and-white Cosmic Explorers, like Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, grandly square off on the level playing floor of the abstract and the representational. It was Americas Khe Sanh-era, however, documentary photography was veering sharply in the hot direction of right between your eyes, and R.I.S.D. ceased to satiate a young dudes hunger for art, revolution, and getting ass. New York City, however, provided these thrills in Venezuelan proportions.

Mitch Epstein. Angkor Wat Temple II 1994 JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

Epstein transferred to Cooper Union, where Garry Winogrand, King of the Quick Take, presided. Winogrand taught the future visual poet, amid his own meditative silences, how to think hard about pictures. One day, Garry brought William Eggleston in to show class color pictures. That was a breakthrough for me, Epstein recalls. Those pictures were beyond my comprehension, but they were titillating and unlike anything Id ever seen.

Maybe the single most significant thing Winogrand taught me about color was to forget the fact that I had it in the camera.

Mitch Epstein. Lai Chan Government Guest House 1995 JGS, Inc.

One of Epsteins early series of photographs about Vietnam, subsequently published as Vietnam: A Book of Changes, reminds us how life is this mysterious, ennobling journey, forever in flux, and we can cheat the experience by pretending to know it. Most Americans understanding of Vietnam derives, but exclusively, from Janis & Jimis Rock n Roll 60s: the raggedy faces of American boys emptying M 16s through veils of smoke; figures running across rice paddies then pitched back and dropped; soldiers piled high on tanks with blue-gray death spreading up their bleeding bodies. All kinds of crazy shit popped out of Walter Cronkites Thats the way it is CBS evening news. I am not a veteran, said Epstein. This project began with the memory of a war I had not fought and yet, by

definition as an American, had suffered. I wanted to feel and understand that war as much as a non-vet can.

Mitch Epstein. Angkor Wat Temple III 1994 JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

But the images Epstein presents dont stoke hatreds, sorrows, or troubles to brood about and maybe expiate. American icons scattered here and there a bullet hole in the room of an Opera house, a pair of American army boots, the burned out shell of a tank in Hue but the photographs you see have little to do with the runic truths of war. Epstein turns a corner, his gaze shifting forward instead, to take in the next view and walk into it. His melancholic still-life images flare vernacular to the sublime giving you a fuller account. Youre free of the elaborate inventions of writers. Americas malign obsession with this 4,000 year-old civilization is dispelled. You wake up breathing todays air not yesterdays.

Mitch Epstein. Untitled III (New York) 1997 JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

When Epstein returned home in 1995, he began shooting a series about New York City. When I was abroad, he said, the problem was how to know better what wasnt my own, to know the references that would make my photographs meaningful. Here, I had to learn to move through familiar territory like a foreigner. Falcon-eyed investor, Epstein rummages the offerings of city life, then something springs out of hiding, grabbing him by the throat. Im especially intrigued by the meaning of myth, wrote Mitch Epstein, and how everyday life can adopt a quality of myth when photographed. In this manner, myth can become a language of its own. The mythic illuminates whats poignantly and simply human.

Mitch Epstein. Untitled (New York) 1997 JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

~ Robert Goethals, December 2010