Taken between 2003 and 2008, Mitch Epstein’s images in American Power are inherently political. Not only is this a book of photographs, it is a story of a photographer operating in a state of Patriot Act paranoia, where setting up one’s view camera can create an eminent sense of confrontation in a landscape already violently reconstructed by an entity much larger than any individual.

The project began as a commission to photograph the town of Cheshire, Ohio, where the American Electric Power Company had, as Epstein puts it, “paid the residents of Cheshire a lump sum to leave, never come back, and never complain in the media or in court if they became sick from environmental contaminates…” an insightful necessity Epstein adds to further strengthen the character of a body of work containing a complex and revealing power struggle.




The book itself can be held as a successful document of revelation in a post 9/11 environment. The images sequence from monstrous objects of American resource to the communities and individuals directly affected (regularly accompanied with Epstein’s subtle sense of humor). Whether these individuals are the consequence of America’s long held comforts or the upholders of “Manifest Destiny” is irrelevant, they are all part of the interconnected scenario Epstein has depicted. Certainly the dynamic nature of the images would come across as grand visual documents in a gallery setting, but the format of the book holds true to the complexity of Epstein’s story. This is not only a book about how American’s consume energy, it carries the weight of our current political and social power struggles… simple ideologies that “teeter between collapse and transformation.”



“The wounds I discovered in the American Landscape made me reconsider my own sense of entitlement and the American heritage of Manifest Destiny,” proclaims Epstein. “These Pictures question the human conquest of nature at any cost. Might we, as Americans, consider our obligation to nature and one another, not only our individual rights?” —Antone Dolezal