Mitch Epstein Lecture at Columbia College
Mitch Epstein gave a lecture at Columbia College last Thursday (February 19, 2010) about his recently completed American Power series. He explained that it all started as a documentary project about American electric power. But, as is often the case, one type of power trailed off into another and where electric power ended, corporate power began and so the pictures he took or the images he made form a swirling, descriptive commentary on electric, political, corporate, civic, religious, architectural, and perhaps even aesthetic American power.
For the most part, he made the pictures using an 8x10 view camera, which means he was lugging around an enormous tripod and ducking under a black cloth to frame and meter the images.
This type of equipment subjects a photographer to a pretty high degree of exposure - running around with a tripod as big as a person and ducking under a big, suspicious black cloth is not exactly what people want to see some out-of-towner doing on the periphery of a Nuclear power plant's grounds... However, it also means that the prints from these pictures are lush and enormous - most around 6 feet by 8 feet - and they retain an absurd quantity of detail, even at that size.
Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia, 2004.
70 x 92 inches
70 x 92 inches
from American Power.
Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California 2005
70 x 92 inches
From the series American Power
Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California II 2007
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
Wyodak Coal Mine, Wyoming 2008
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
BP Carson Refinery, California 2007
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
Epstein talked at length about being stopped and questioned by the authorities while photographing national security sensitive centers of power. He explained the mixed intentions that lead to the theatricality of the two trees in this image, the way they parted to reveal that Frankenstein amalgam of tubes, smokestacks and flag that constitute this refinery with a foreground paved in asphalt. Those trees, he explained, hid him. They provided a certain amount of cover that kept him – standing beneath a black sheet on a California roadside with a view camera on a tripod – out of the security guard or state policeman's sight.
Exit Glacier, Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska 2007
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
His lecture was full of similarly flat, uninformative comments.
There's nothing in that statement or the image above that directly points to a manifestation of star-spangled "American Power." Sure, we've all come to associate arctic imagery with power plants and climate change but that's an association that's generationally specific. It was at moments like these where I wanted Epstein to talk about a few of the metaphors or associations that an image like this makes in a series about American Power.
I wanted him to make comments about all the scientific evidence correlating pollution intensive energy generation practices to climate change and how that's manifest in imagery, about the power of the American landscape to spread people from one end of a continent to the other or about Nature's glacial powers of geological transformation, or maybe about the art historical tradition of seeing landscapes as bodies and perhaps how this one is bruised or smeared with dirt or diminishing. Or how, in the image that follows, a white pipe and gravel puncture an otherwise flowery, overcast, pastoral scene.
Trans-Alaska Pipeline 2007
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
The sparse comments combined with digital projections that Epstein himself cited as too low-res to really get a sense for the images made me wonder why we'd all bothered to pack into the lecture hall. We probably would've been better served just flipping through a copy of the book.
...
Gavin Coal Power Plant, Chesire, Ohio 2003
70 x 92 inches
from American Power
In a couple of months, Mitch Epstein will plaster billboards of these images in several of the communities that he photographed - beginning, I think, in Ohio. The intention is to subvert advertising and present those communities with complex, geo-biographical images that address the issue of so much American Power right in their backyard - all of this despite Epstein's claim that politics didn't play much a role when he's out shooting the images themselves. There will be a digital forum set up for discussion at whatisamericanpower.com - how successful this New Yorker's attempt at fostering environmentally tinged discussion will be
In any case - it's a project with strange aspirations, dimensions and incredibly rich visuals.
Check out Mitch Epstein's site.
