Mitch Epstein: In India
Between 1978 and 1989, Mitch Epstein made eight trips to India and shot tens of thousands of photographs. He also made three films there with his Indian wife, director Mira Nair. The photographs in this book are the result of Epstein’s unusual dual vantage in an extraordinarily complicated culture: through his Indian family life and work, he was both an insider and outsider. Epstein was able to enter a wide swath of subcultures that included a striptease cabaret, the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, Bollywood movie sets, an old-time Punjabi wedding band, and religious pilgrims both Muslim and Hindu. In India is the fruit of Epstein’s deep and extended experience of India, where separate worlds converged.
About the Author
Mitch Epstein (born 1952, Holyoke, Massachusetts) is a photographer who helped pioneer fine-art color photography in the 1970s. Epstein has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century.
His photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern in London.
His new series, Property Rights, was exhibited at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne in the fall of 2019 and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas in 2020-2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2020), Museum Helmond, Netherlands (2019), Andreas Murkudis, Berlin; Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris (2016-17); as well as Fondation A Stichting in Brussels (2013); Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY (2012); Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne (2012); Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (2011); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011); and Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne (2011).
Epstein’s fifteen books include Property Rights (Steidl, fall 2021), In India (Steidl, fall 2021), Sunshine Hotel (Steidl/PPP Editions, fall 2019); Rocks and Clouds (Steidl 2017); New York Arbor (Steidl 2013); Berlin (Steidl/The American Academy in Berlin 2011); American Power (Steidl 2009); Mitch Epstein: Work (Steidl 2006); Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (Steidl 2005); and Family Business (Steidl 2003), winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. In 2020, Mitch Epstein was inducted as an Academician to the National Academy of Design. In 2011, Epstein won the Prix Pictet for American Power. Among his other awards are the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003).
