The National Gallery of Art in Washington received a “comprehensive gift” of 1,261 photographs by Mitch Epstein, whom the museum called “one of the most important living American photographers,” it said last month.

Epstein’s photos “examine American communities and the issues that affect them, from economic change to environmental crisis to civic protest, as well as probing more personal narratives, including his identity as the grandson of Eastern European immigrants and life in his adopted hometown of New York City,” the museum said.

The donation from Epstein and his wife, Susan Bell, spans the septuagenarian artist’s “full career” and “transforming the National Gallery’s contemporary photography holdings and establishing the most significant institutional collection of the artist’s work,” according to the museum.

Among the donated photos are eight 2018 photos of the Tree of Life synagogue memorial in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, the site of an Oct. 27, 2018, attack, in which a gunman killed 11 people, many of them Jewish worshipers.

Those pictures are part of Epstein’s larger series called “property rights,” which the photographer made between 2017 and 2020, according to Diane Waggoner, acting head of photographs at the National Gallery.

“Drawn to sites where questions of history, memory and civic life were unfolding in public space, he traveled to locations across the United States, including gatherings surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline, the removal of Confederate monuments, public demonstrations and memorial sites such as the Tree of Life Synagogue,” Waggoner told JNS.

“Together, the works reflect moments of gathering, remembrance and debate across the American landscape,” she said.

The photographer, who was born in Holyoke, Mass., in 1952, studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union. The artist, who is Jewish, studied with Garry Winogrand, the Jewish street photographer, who died in 1984 and was one of his generation’s most famous artists.

The gift to the National Gallery includes images of Epstein’s grandfather at his Holyoke dental lab, as well as more than a dozen images of his parents, ranging from a picture in which his father can be seen at a distance through a window, evoking Edward Hopper’s cityscapes, to his parents doing dishes.

One of the Tree of Life memorial pictures shows flowers on the ground and a tree tied with police tape in front of the synagogue, while others show people at the site with bowed heads, pressed palms and apparently reading from a prayer book.

In a picture, a man lays a stone that reads “love” in front of the memorial, where a menorah, flowers and memorial candles can be seen. In another, a man holds up his phone to show something to someone else.

“It’s interesting that some of Epstein’s pictures taken of the Tree of Life Synagogue memorial show people looking at their phones,” Waggoner told JNS. “While so much of our lives is now mediated by our phone screens, Epstein tends to work slowly and thoughtfully, often with a large-format camera, which requires a more careful setup.”

“His pictures are distinguished by a careful attention to observed details, whether of people, nature or even objects and signs encountered in the urban environment,” she said. “He asks us to slow down and take in the details of life. Many of his photographs are replete with detail and suggestive narratives.”

The photographer made a “highly personal series,” titled “family business,” which “chronicles the demise of his family’s once thriving furniture store in Holyoke,” according to Waggoner.

“It was founded in 1911 by his grandfather, Israel, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, and passed down to his father and aunt,” she said. “The story he tells is emblematic of so many Eastern European Jews, who came to the United States in the late 19th or early 20th century, often from humble beginnings, to find success as entrepreneurs.”

“The framing of this work as Jewish art is thus critical to understanding the works, but it’s both a Jewish story and an American story at the same time,” she said.

Other images in the donated collection include the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, in Berlin, a spider casting a shadow on an old wedding portrait of Israel and Sarah Epstein, a watercolor painting of Israel (“Izzy”) Epstein on a car seat, as well as images from a trip to Berlin of a Stasi memorial, Checkpoint Charlie and of the Dalai Lama at Brandenburg Gate.

There are also photos of his father’s tenants, of police officers and firemen, power plants, the Hoover Dam, Washington monuments, protests, churches and sites in Vietnam, India, New York City, Greece, Rome, Louisiana, England, Florida, Egypt and Massachusetts, including Martha’s Vineyard.

In 2020, Epstein told the Brooklyn Rail that “I’m an American artist born into a Jewish American family in a suburban town in New England, where I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel stifled.”

“I left as soon as I could. At 15 years old, I convinced my parents to send me to boarding school. But the school was stifling in a different way,” he told the publication. “I was formed by my strong reactions against the conformity of suburbia and the conservatism and rigidity of my school.”

The artist has also talked about breaking with “family protocol” and visiting Germany, despite relatives having refused to do so “in deference to lost kin who had perished in the Holocaust.”

“I was drawn to the Berlin that had attempted to annihilate my ancestors,” he stated, “as well as the Berlin that had embodied the Cold War division, which had threatened the bedrock stability of my American childhood.”

   | Read More JNS.org – Jewish News Syndicate