Mitch Epstein, Cocoa Beach I, Florida 1983. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Cocoa Beach I, Florida 1983*. Courtesy of Steidl.

CHARLIE BREEN I’d like to congratulate you on Sunshine Hotel. It can’t be easy putting together a book that spans work as extensive as yours. First, is there anyone in particular who inspired you to pursue the kind of documentary-style photography you adopted? If so, have these artistic inspirations changed much over time

MITCH EPSTEIN Thank you. I moved to NYC in 1973 to attend the Cooper Union, where I studied with Garry Winogrand. He taught me that my preconceptions were not my friends, and not to get caught up in the rhetoric of art school. Winogrand encouraged me to walk the city and discover it, while exploring my interests with a camera. One of his mantras was that anything and everything is infinitely photographable. At twenty-one that concept was mind-blowing. Given what’s happening now with most everyone taking pictures of just about everything on their mobile phones, I guess he was ahead of the curve.

I was also influenced by the writing and exhibitions curated by John Szarkowski at MoMA. I made frequent trips to MoMA’s Department of Photography Study Room, and viewed prints by Atget, Evans, Sander, and so on. There was no better way to learn about the medium than looking at original prints.

Over a fifty-year history, I’ve been inspired by many artists working in multiple media from around the globe. I’m drawn to art that jars my established ways of thinking, and inspires me to question my own possiblities. “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” and “Apex,” two recent works by Arthur Jafa, have done just that though their painfully poignant and complex use of found imagery.

Mitch Epstein, Biloxi, Mississippi 2005. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Biloxi, Mississippi 2005*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN Can you describe the collaboration process with Andrew Roth?

EPSTEIN For Sunshine Hotel, I initially went into my archive and pulled more than five hundred images made in and about America over the past 50 years. Then I worked closely with my editor Andrew Roth to select the final 175 pictures that ended up in the book. Andrew and I were clear about not wanting to make a retrospective of my past projects, or a greatest hits catalogue of my most iconic images. Instead, Sunshine Hotel is a monograph that mixes recent and older photographs from all of my American series, the majority of them previously unpublished. Andrew created sequences that juxtapose my pictures in startling new ways to conjure up America as a place and an idea. Each sequence has its own visual and psychological logic; Andrew was like a musical composer arranging the sequences themselves into a precise order to produce a crescendo over the course of the book. I hope that people will read the book like a novel, starting at page one and moving forward page by page, passage by passage. That’s how they will experience what we intended: a visceral immersion in American-ness.

Mitch Epstein, Untitled, New York #10, 1996. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Untitled, New York #10, 1996*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN Tell me about the “spirited conversations” between yourself and Roth. What were the different perspectives that you both had?

EPSTEIN Our friendship has been fostered through passionate conversations about art and life and what America means for us. It helped that Andrew has looked at my pictures closely, understood and appreciated them over many years. I trusted him to bring a fresh reading to my work. I think our conversations were about how far to go with disturbing or even shocking images and juxtapositions. I am wary of the gratuitous. I want to make sure everything I put out into the world is authentic and feels necessary—to me at least. Sometimes, through showing me his ideas and talking them through, Andrew convinced me to be more daring. The fact is that certain pictures and sequences are deeply troubling, because this country is deeply troubled. I’m grateful that Andrew pressed me, at times, to be more direct.

Mitch Epstein, Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts 1983. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts 1983*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN What was it like to reflect on a lot of your past work? Can you describe some of the memories brought on from re-viewing images from your time in North Dakota for example? How much time did you spend photographing the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline? Do you think you’ll revisit those stories in the future?

EPSTEIN I first went to Standing Rock after Trump was elected and he reversed the Army Corps of Engineers review of the DAPL pipeline. It was nearly 20 degrees below zero when I landed in Bismarck, ND. The weather was brutal, the mood in the camps was tense, and law enforcement and aggressive pipeline security teams were closing in with the intention to shut them down.

The most meaningful encounter I had was with the matriarchal elders, known as grandmothers; who are carriers of deep cultural knowledge. Many of them had been at the Standing Rock resistance from the beginning, and were not about to leave until they were forcibly evicted. Listening to their stories inspired me to think harder about our historical wrongs. That’s when I decided to commit to making an extended piece of work about land in America, and the question of who owns the land and at what cost?

In 2018, I returned to photograph a four-day prayer walk from the site of the camps to the courthouse in Mandan, ND, where many of the trials were taking place for those arrested during the protest actions. And later in 2018, I spent a couple of weeks on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation, visiting critical sites from Wounded Knee to Mt. Rushmore/Six Grandfathers, all of which related to the fraught history of the U.S. and Lakota peoples.

Mitch Epstein, Flag 2000. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Flag 2000*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN You’re praised as a pioneer of color photography. How important was it to, and why did you include some of your black and white photographs in the book? Were these chosen for their aesthetic or the stories they tell?

EPSTEIN With SH, I dug deep into my archive. Some of my earliest pictures were black and white. My photographic practive has always been protean: I’ve frequently changed my subject, format, camera, and palette as a way to extend my practice and give myself new challenges. For conceptual and formal reasons I chose to use black and white for my trilogy about nature as it intersects with urban life in New York.

I also included a few pictures I made on commissioned editorial assignments. If the picture worked, and added something to the book, as we conceived it, then Andrew and I didn’t care if I made it as a student or on a job. The pictures had to first work individually and then they had to work in the context of the whole book. Some of our favorite images did not make the cut because they didn’t add to the whole, or we already had other pictures that did something similar.

Mitch Epstein, Untitled, New York #4, 1995. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Untitled, New York #4, 1995*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN Where do you think a book like Sunshine Hotel fits into the current socio-political climate? And do you feel that your work has achieved the goal of expressing your political views?

EPSTEIN SH is not a political diatribe. It asks the reader to undergo an experience of this country by reading each picture, spread, and passage. There are politics embedded in the book, but no one-sided, simplistic message. The country is complicated: it’s magical and corrupt. Both of these truths are in the book. So are my love for and anguish over the United States.

BREEN With this, what kind of work do you wish to continue going forward? Can we expect to see another compilation somewhere down the line?

EPSTEIN Although I recently showed Property Rights at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, and at the Thomas Zander Galerie in Cologne, I’m still working full steam on the project. I’ve got a larger exhibition of Property Rights opening at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas in October 2020. I will eventually make an artists book with the Property Rights photographs—and possibly some other kinds of material, as well. I’m working with other media for this series, so the book wilI be an assemblage of various media beyond photography. Several other publishing and studio projects are in progress—but it’s too soon to talk about them!

Mitch Epstein, Ybor City, Florida II 1983. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Ybor City, Florida II 1983*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN Lastly, I must ask, whose sink are we looking at in the photograph, Apartment 304, 398 Main Street, Holyoke, Massachusetts 2001?

EPSTEIN The sink was in a building that belonged to my father, which he rented to tenants. A fire made the family living in this apartment flee abrubtly before they had the chance to clean their dinner dishes. I was struck by the image of a domestic life arrested mid-stream, and the terrifying yet beautiful still life it made, which bore qualities of an early Flemish painting.

My father owned many buildings that were susceptible to fires and arson. I made an extended project, Family Business, about him and the changes in my hometown of Holyoke, Masssachusetts. One of his buildings was set on fire by two teenage boys; the fire spread and took down an entire city block, which led to a fifteen million dollar law suit against my father.

Mitch Epstein, Ashton Clatterbuck, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 2018. Courtesy of Steidl. — Mitch Epstein, *Ashton Clatterbuck, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 2018*. Courtesy of Steidl.

BREEN You recently had an exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., how would you link Property Rights to the overarching work of Sunshine Hotel?

EPSTEIN Both projects draw connections in different ways between seemingly different narratives. It is the people of Property Rights that are the link in, be they American Indians at Standing Rock, humanitarian workers in the Borderlands, or native Hawaiians taking a stand against the construction of the worlds largest telescope. They are all taking a stand for what they believe in and that’s what bridges the multiple narratives of the series.

Sunshine Hotel came about because of the work that I was making for Property Rights, which inspired me to look back at the history of my American work, and bring the past into conversation with the present, activating the past, and thereby denying the potential for nostalgia. The older photographs take on new meanings by virtue of how they fall within the sequences, and how they interact with photographs of the country we live in today. By re-contextualizing my history in SH, I’ve been able to perceive new meaning in the work, and I hope that comes across to my readers.

Mitch’s book, Sunshine Hotel, is published by Steidl. It is available for purchase here.