Mitch Epstein: A Language of New York

A photographic meditation on what it means to be a New Yorker: an identity that shifts as constantly and as rapidly as the city itselfIn 1995, renowned American photographer Mitch Epstein (born 1952) began making pictures in New York City as it underwent a seismic cultural and physical shift. The gritty neighborhoods and sassy unselfconsciousness of the 1970s, when Epstein had first moved to New York, were disappearing. Signs of the future were encroaching: surveillance cameras, the normalization of gun violence as a virtual reality game in Times Square and Disney’s gentrification of the old theaters and strip clubs on 42nd Street. As a seasoned documentarian of the American landscape and psyche, Epstein set out to photograph the streets and public spaces of New York in this strange liminal space, between past and future. A year into the project, he also began making black-and-white portraits of his inner circle in their homes or workspaces as an intimate counterpoint to his color photographs of street life. A Language of New York examines the city’s recurrent self-cannibalizing into a new upcycled landscape and the urban relationship between public and private. Both gimlet-eyed inquiry and loving homage, it describes an incredibly resilient city prone to cooperation, protest, consumerism and creativity in the extremes. Read more