Mitch Epstein (American, born 1952)
Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia
Gift of John Andrew MacMahon, Class of 1995
On view in the Belk Visual Art Center
The tension is palpable between two juxtaposed worlds stitched together at the horizon. A lighthearted candid shot of a high school football game is quickly threatened by clouds gushing from power plant cooling towers. The muddy blue-shifted power plant interrupts the coordination of vibrant crimson between the football jerseys, bleachers, and autumn leaves. Even the football players crouching in the foreground are diminished by a greater form lurking in the background. I’m reminded of the relatively fragile human forms who, if not for the saturated reds, are at risk of fading into invisibility.
Mitch Epstein’s photographs are characteristically dense with cultural confrontation. In 2003, Epstein began to respond to an era under the shadow of climate change. Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia is part of his series of interrogations of the American relationship with energy. The dominance of industry has become a familiar part of the American landscape. In many places, we are visibly crushed beneath the weight of our own dependency on energy. The monolithic structures churning out exhaust just above the suburb reveals an unsettling power dynamic. By capturing the encroachment of energy infrastructure on community spaces, Epstein rightfully poses the persistence of consumer culture against human ephemerality.
Epstein is an American photographer and pioneer of fine-art color photography. His work has been shown internationally and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, among others. He is a recipient of many grants, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has published numerous books and has worked on several films as director, cinematographer, and production designer. He is currently based in New York City, where he lives with his family.
-Molly Smith ’24