Recreation: West Village, New York City 1981

There are few ideas more central to American mythos, and to the traditions of American photography itself, than the great American road trip. Throughout his 50-year career, the photographer Mitch Epstein has ventured throughout the country seeking the nexus points that define American identity in all its strange and unexpected contradictions.

Photographed throughout the 70s and 80s, Epstein’s Recreation surveys the rituals of pleasure and undercurrent of alienation that defined late twentieth-century America. The breadth of places and subjects Epstein explored take the form of a visual epic that spans from coast to coast and across social and cultural divides. Throughout the series, the photographer’s voice intersperses joy with curiosity, sorrow with earnestness, and casts stylistic and emotional nets widely to capture the endless span of late century American identity. Epstein began Recreation at a time when color photography had barely begun to become accepted within the historical photographic canon. Along with his contemporaries in Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, and William Eggleston, Epstein helped to define a new photo-literative tradition while engaging in the impossible task of defining what it means to be American.

The title Recreation itself is a testament to Post-War American affluence that saturates the frames of Epstein’s pictures. When touring the work we encounter moments of mundane serenity, but also the debaucheries of nightlife, antics of American youth, and the enriched banalities of family life. What we see in Epstein’s pictures are time capsules of a particular era of American capitalist excess, a cultural snapshot of the last vestiges of pre-techno-dominant lifestyles, and an ode to the attitudes of American exceptionalism that proudly pronounce, “we just do what we want.”

Edition: 1 of 1