Mitch Epstein’s first UK solo show will launch the Open Eye Gallery’s new home, Laura Davis reports
THERE’S an uncomfortable contradiction in Mitch Epstein’s American Power series of photographs which depict generating stations, cooling towers, reactors and dams across the US.
The images seem to celebrate these masculine structures as totems of man’s ability to harness nature for his own, selfish purpose – but Epstein’s reason for recording these masculine structures is quite the opposite.
His American Power series will be the launch exhibition of the Open Eye Gallery’s new Mann Island home, which opens next Friday.
The large-scale pictures on display are the result of his expeditions to 25 states over six years, but the project has its origins in a single small town in Ohio, which Epstein documented in 2003 after it was compulsory purchased by the American Electric Power company.
His “odyssey”, as he describes it, did not make him popular in post-9/11 America, where a man taking photographs of power stations was considered a major breach of security.
In West Virginia, events took a sinister turn.
“The first time I went there I was questionned heavily by law enforcement leading up to an interrogation by the FBI,” reveals Epstein, whose Open Eye exhibition will be his first solo show.
He returned two years later to record mountain top removal – a mining technique that involves blasting the summit of a mountain with explosives to reveal the coal seams – and the reception was unexpectedly far less frosty.
“I wrote to the public relations department of the American Electric plant there and to my surprise was welcomed to make a formal visit,” he explains.
“When I got there the gentleman had one of my books, Recreation, on his desk and said he was a big fan of my work and would I sign it for him. It was a total surprise.
“Even though I was shut out and frustrated by the odyssey I had to move through, often being told I couldn’t take pictures, in the end I persisted and surprising things sometimes happened.”
