All right, let's do this. Peanut, if you're staying in the room, no talking. Hello and welcome to the Photo Work Podcast, the talky and touchy feely version of my book, photo work 40 photographers on process and Practice. Hello, everyone. I'm Sascha Wolf recording from Woodstock, New York, and joined as usual by my friend and producer, Mr. Michael Chovendalton. Hello, Michael.
Hello there. And I am in my office at Mercer.
At Mercer College in somewhere in the block office. Right.
I never mentioned it, but I know my audio sounds different when I'm here and that's why.
Well, you and I both were very nimble in that way. I mean,
I haven't felt nimble in a long time.
Well, no, me neither. Frankly, I can't even squat at the moment because I might break one of my new knees. But. Oh, no, I think I mentioned this already. The CPW is expanding, working on the floor above where my normal recording studio is. They're building out these artist studios, so I had to pack up my gear and bring it back home. So I'm recording now in the guest room. So it's good. Our equipment is somewhat mobile, somewhat. Still scrappy.
Yeah.
So how are you? Any news? Anything? Anything?
Not a lot. It's kind of the same. We're in our finals week here and the lab is a wreck. But that's a good sign. It just means everybody's working and making different things. Yeah. And I was at a picture house, a small darkroom over the weekend to hear Andrea Modica give her talk and had a great reunion with a lot of photo work people and people we know in common. Yeah. And the talk was great too, I'm sure.
Yeah. Sorry I missed that. I was in last week at the photography show, otherwise known as apad and also saw a lot of wonderful friends and colleagues, Lots of great reunions. But I did run back upstate to get some stuff done over the weekend, so I missed Andrea's talk. Sorry to have missed that. Someone we adore, but yeah, absolutely. It's always fun. It's sort of. The photography show week is camp reunion.
Yeah. It's actually a lot of fun to be in New York and you run into everyone.
Everybody. I know, I know, it's really amazing. Well, we're just folks haven't checked out our social media. We're just announcing our Senior Fellows for 2026. Wonderful new group and huge thanks to our jury and can go on the Photo Work foundation website also to learn more about that. But let's get to the show. This was a show we actually held onto. I'll let you explain why. We recorded it a few months ago, actually, but it's with great photographer Mitch Epstein.
Yeah. So we were sitting on this for a while because Mitch had an exciting announcement that we just had to wait for him to make that announcement. And the National Gallery Art has acquired his entire archive of work. And it is really just great news for Mitch, who is part of the canon and history of photography.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Mitch knew before the announcement was made and he mentions it in this episode, but then it took a while for the National Gallery to make the announcement. And so we were just sort of sitting on this episode. But so happy for Mitch. And what were your thoughts about the episode in general?
Oh, yeah. So listening to Mitch is like listening to a bit of history and that, you know, he's been doing this long enough where he's been influenced by people like Gary Winogrand and John Sioukovsky, but then also has been doing it in a way where he reinvents himself. And so he goes from being that kind of photograph a lot, think about it later, figure it out later, to someone who's very project forward and someone who's thinking about collaborating with people and what that means and you know, what a privilege it is to work the way he works and to be able to work. And throughout the whole episode, he's incredibly thoughtful and sincere. He's so filled with gratitude. He takes nothing for granted. I think that's the big takeaway for me.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's really turned into a artist activist in many ways. Extremely committed to certain causes and develops his work around those interests and yeah, incredible career and really a privilege to get a chance to talk with him. So very thankful to Mitch.
Yes.
Well, why don't we get to it, Michael, if you don't mind, please take it away.
My pleasure. And here is your conversation with Mitch Epstein.
Mitch Epstein, welcome to the Photo Work podcast. It's so wonderful to have you on. We've been working towards getting you on for quite a while. So the anticipation was building and the day has finally arrived and I'm so, so happy. So thank you so much for doing this.
Happy to be here. Thank you.
So, Mitch, I'll just tell you a little inside Baseball Nugget. My recording studio and my. The offices for the Photo Work foundation are back at my beloved CPW center for Photography. And so that's where I am right now. And yesterday I was reading, I was looking through your wonderful book American Nature and I was reading this interview in the back that you did with your good friend and colleague Brian Wallace, who of course is the executive director of cpw. And so as I was reading through this interview, Brian was wandering past my door. So it felt very connected and all in the family, as the photo community always does to me, which I love so much. So, yeah, it was really nice to. I didn't tap Brian for any inside info, but I could have. Would have been very convenient.
The book that you speak of was made as a catalog for an exhibition, American Nature in Turin, Italy. Brian was a terrific collaborator. So really everything about that book is, I think, a kind of reflection of his commitment to critical discourse around the medium and also a kind of here, very intensive look at my work and the arc of my work over the last 20 years and how I got to where I am now. So Brian's a kindred colleague, but a dear friend and, yeah, a special curator.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I love being around his energy and his creativity. But let's talk about you. So, Mitch, a long and wonderful and incredibly important career in the photographic art world and very admiring of so many of your projects, but really your career as a whole, the arc of it thus far, your curiosity about the world, your commitment to your values, that really tricky high wire act of getting out there and trying to document and talk about and engage with really important subjects while also remaining committed to the art of photography and describing the world in a way that, as Robert Adams would want us to do, add something to it that is more elevated or something different than the world as we actually see it. And I think you've just had a career of doing that and doing it in so many different ways. And it's just been really amazing to be immersed in your work for the past number of months as I've been getting ready to talk to you. So I just wanted to say that. But before we get into all of it, can you. Can you tell folks about your journey, where you were born and raised, and how you got into photography?
I was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is a small town on the Connecticut River. It was once the paper capital of the world. And so it's a very typical New England industrial town. I ended up, to make this, you know, long story short, I ended up in New York in 1972 to study at the Cooper Union. And that was a transformative moment for me in my Life. I was 20. It was a privilege to get into Cooper tuition, of course. Yeah, at the time, but it was Also an incredible moment in the city. And so moving to New York, studying at Cooperation, being mentored by Gary Winogrand, who was my first teacher at the summer.
Amazing.
All that together was, I think, key to getting captivated and lost, if you will, in making pictures. I mean, lost in the sense that it gave me a kind of purpose or possibility, but also a means to begin to make sense of where I was, having grown up in a small New England town and all of a sudden being in this major cultural and financial capital here in New York. So I've been in New York really ever since. It's been my primary residence and also the place for my studio practice, I think.
You.
Did you start at RISD and then switch to Cooper?
Yeah, I started it, actually. I did a year of study at Union College in Schenectady, and then I transferred to RISD for a year and then transferred to Cooper. Yeah, I mean, the story of how I even gravitated to Cooper, there was an advertisement in the New York Times Arts and Leisure Sunday section at the time. That's what it was called 4 by Cooper Union, looking for transfer students in photography. It was a kind of a renaissance moment at Cooper for photographs. Yeah.
That's incredible.
So I pulled together what little I had and came down to the city and made a presentation, applied and got in. You know, I had thought about coming to New York when I transferred and applied to risd, but there was a reticence from my family, and I just. It was. I wasn't ready for it, and I was so ready when the time actually came.
Well, I even mention it just because, as you may or may not know, I think of the podcast as a place where a lot of learning can take place for the folks who listen. And one thing that just struck me was just how important it is to sort of be flexible that way. And I think some of the people who have sort of gotten to where they want to be in their career are people who are open. And I just love the idea of, you know, you being. You were so young, and yet you knew that you needed to make that change and you did it. And that's not always easy. You know, I'm sure looking back, you don't think about it that way, but I have some memory of being that age. And, you know, it's not easy to make those decisions when you're 20 years old. And it seems like that was just such a, you know, it was a bold thing to do, and it seems like just brilliant move.
Thank you for noting that there's no question that the disorientation that I suffered and learned to endure and to work my way through at that time, really just, of course, the stimulation of the city, but how alien it was. But really, the disorientation was through the mentorship of Winogrand. And I can recall coming out of his classes, it would be already early evening, and studying with him was so much about unlearning and about getting all of the preconceived notions of what it meant to make pictures, what the medium was about, what it meant to be an artist. Being in art school and getting into Cooper, of course, there was a certain, you know, headiness that came with that. And being in the company of Winogrand, but also under his tutelage, was so valuable because so much got thrown out the window. And in doing that, you know, that's not always so comfortable, even, because at 20, coming from another place, kind of trying to sort of find my way. But that disorientation and the essence of that is something that I have allowed within my practice really from that moment. Going back to the early 70s with Winogrand, when I went to India for the first time in 1978, it was such a leap. I had no idea where I was, what the references meant, and yet, you know, what this culture was about. I mean, I was, you know, I grew up in a somewhat sheltered, small New England town in a Jewish community. I went to boarding school. My real world experience was very limited, of course.
How could it not be? Yeah, right.
So in that sense, we are so much a product of where we come from and so much of my path and my grace is that for me, that I've managed to negotiate my way back forward through challenges which are often unfamiliar and at times difficult, but with the confidence that by being measured and patient and curious and disciplined that I'll get through the periods where I don't know where I'm going. I don't understand what it is that I'm looking at. I have no idea how to translate a particular experience into making pictures or some way of giving it a form.
Your practice is, to me, sort of the really quintessential smart, foundational way of putting something together. Which is to say you. It seems like from what I've read and I've listened to some interviews with you that you do for many of your projects, not all and can get into that, but a tremendous amount of research with your assistants to really put together something that feels really solid as a jumping off point. But with that sort of solid base, you then can sort of go off and let things unfold in a much more natural, holistic, spontaneous way. And you know, I'm certainly thinking about American power, property rights, old growth particularly. Can you talk about that way of working? Because I think there's so much good instruction in that.
Well, look, my first 20 years, really up through the 80s into the early 90s, my practice was not project based. I really went from picture to picture. And even though I had very focused interests from time to time, themes that I built on within my photographic practice, I was also working collaboratively in film. I shot several documentary films in India with my first wife, Mira Nair, and then also collaborated on fiction films. And what really happened for me, a kind of crossroads for me, was when our collaboration ended with working on the film Mississippi Masala and I really returned in a full fledged way to just working on my own practice. In the early 90s, I shifted to working in a project format. And that project format was one that was very informed by all that I learned working collaboratively as a filmmaker. As a filmmaker, I co produced films with Mira, I shot the documentaries. I production designed Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala. And I did that drawing on my photographic experience, working out in the real world, drawing my work from real world experience. But really I gained a sense of how I could, with my own photographic practice, take on projects that were ambitious, sometimes too ambitious, but that could have scope and that could benefit from learning about subjects that I had limited knowledge of and really importantly, collaborate with others. You know, I come out of a photographic practice that was very singular and very much about being behind the camera. I mean, that's what, you know, you look at Winogrand and look at practice. And I learned from that that was valuable for a certain period of time. But even as I made a shift going, you know, in say the late 70s to working with a medium format camera from working with a Leica, it forced me to step back and to take a bit more control in terms of how I was shaping my pictures, even though I wasn't significantly altering what was in front of the camera. But that led me by the early 90s, to begin to think in a way that was more conceptual, without forsaking the integrity of a photographic practice that was essentially drawing from experience out in the real world and valuing the ways in which I could create a kind of photographic tableau, a kind of narrative that was specific to the possibilities for the medium, but that could have breadth as a body of work in A way that I hadn't done up until then. So that was a turning point. And really, ever since then, I have done significant work, research leading up to my projects and as I'm making them, because that has for sure informed the practice and made me ask questions, challenged some of my own assumptions. And so, you know, the detachment, I think, is critical to not being too beholden to past practice and all the different things I've done. You know, I mentioned working in film. I have collaborated with musicians. I've made a few multimedia projects totally solo, as when I did family business. And so photography has been my primary medium, but not to the exclusion of other possibilities. Yeah, of course, you know, when you look at the whole thing, it's a bit unwieldy and a bit, at times, a kind of poetic riddle, like, how did I get from A to B to C to D? Why, you know, why did I go to Vietnam after, you know, spending more than a decade working in India as a photographer and filmmaker? You know, and what did that mean and where did that lead me next? And sometimes those choices, you know, in the moment, somewhat unclear. I follow my instinct. I listen to what gets under my skin, what moves me and. Or troubles or excites me in a way where I won't question the commitment, and I'll invest myself in a way where I truly don't know where it is that I'm going with something I don't. My work is not, you know, I mean, even the series that I finished recently, Old Growth, it's not typological. I'm really working very hard to go from picture to picture in a way where I'm addressing the singular possibilities of a picture and effortfully moving to transcend and not be dependent upon the pictures that I've already made about a singular subject. And that's very hard to do. I fail at that all the time. But it is an underlying motivation in the micro, with the actual practice of making pictures one to the next, but also in a broader, more conceptual way, with taking on projects that take significant commitment and enable me to really develop ideas and a kind of larger narrative that I think is truly more conceptual. So with Old Growth, I did a photographic series, but for the first time, I curated another photographer's work. I was interested, a lot of my interest in trying to understand where I come from and things American involves a very careful study of history, photographic history, but also cultural and social history. And so when I've thought about things environmental and our relationship to the environment and to the land, as an American, I've looked closely and critically at the frontier photographers, the 70s, with landscape exhibitions that John Szarkowski curated at MoMA, I got to know the work of Darius Kinsey. So as I started to get interested in looking at some of our oldest and largest trees in the United States, I revisited the work of Kinsey. I got access to his archive at a small museum in Washington state, and in collaboration with the archive, had scans made of a number of Kinsey pictures and then set those pictures to a filmic piece with a composition by the composer David Lange, performed by Maya Beiser, which was the entrance piece to my show in Turin. I also wanted to work with moving image in a way that would enable me, with Old Growth, to touch on a different sensory experience of the forest than what I could do with still photography, working with an 8x10 camera. So I returned to working in the Berkshires, where I began the Old Growth project, commissioned two tonal musicians to do improvisational compositions at two of the sites that I photographed, and then over the course of a year, through the Arc of the Seasons, shot video, and then put together a three channel piece with moving image and a soundtrack, weaving ambient sound from these particular forests with the tonal musicians that I recorded in collaboration with a fabulous editor. So again, did I know what I was going to do with that when I started? No, it was a total leap. I was, you know, I was on the line, you know, commissioning musicians, the expense, the uncertainty, of course, pulling all that together. I lucked out in this case. I had support from a filmmaker friend, you know, Maud Helpful, who helped me when we shot the musicians. I met a fabulous Australian editor, Kate Williams. She had just come off a project working with Matthew Barney. So she was. She's a fiction film editor, but she was opening to working with an artist or artists on special projects. These collaborations, these sort of interdisciplinary conversations have been so instrumental to creating possibilities for the direction of my work. And so that's a long winded answer to no, it's great, but I think I covered some ground.
No, no, it's wonderful. And, you know, it's making me think. It's almost like with you and your sort of creative spirit, it's like the yin and yang of the sort of studiousness that you employ, the research that we mentioned, and then also the sort of semi. I don't use this as a slur, but the semi didactic nature of some of your projects, especially some of the more recent. Well, whatever, I mean, I include American power in that, but certainly Property rights and in some ways old growth, but absolutely Property rights and American Power. Two of your really well known signature huge, both literally and figuratively, bodies of work. They have a certain didactic nature in terms of what they are about. And there's a certain didactic quality in some of the pictures in those bodies of work, and in many of them, not at all. But it almost feels like the yin and yang of the practice. Right. It's like on one hand, this very sort of, you know, you're dealing with things that are so important and really have such impact on people's actual lives. And there's such sorrow in some of the pictures, I think, particularly in property rights. There's, you know, some of those pictures really are so incredibly moving. And I want you to talk about what I'm referring to, what these projects are about, if you could, in your words. So you have that and then you have this other, you know, side of your artistic self that wants to just, you know, create in a more free form way. And I love that. I mean, I think that's what makes you you and makes the work so incredibly important. Because as we all know in art, we need the art part. You know, we need the beauty and the seduction and the thing to get us in our gut and, you know, in our soul and not just in our head. And I think that, you know, you really do that so beautifully.
Thank you. You know, trusting my intuition. And again, I think it does circle me back to some of the fundamental philosophical positions that I have about, about art making that go back to Winogrand, have really served me throughout. And one of them, you know, being your preconceptions are not your friends. They're, you know, and again, I'm paraphrasing Winogrand, but, you know, there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. And what happens, what is possible with, you know, I've lived through, I think, an era where. Where there was and there has been this kind of continuing divide between art and photography. And art being something that has a fundamental conceptual basis. And photography is something that has an essential photographic basis that's not necessarily conceptual. And I've learned from both. And even though my primary medium is still photography, the influences for my photographic practice are coming from all different sources, as I made mention of earlier. But certainly on the art side as much, from looking at multimedia work, from painting to cinema to sound works. So the nature of the political in my work, and I think that that bears meaning as you call attention to American power into property rights really Goes again also back to my beginnings. I was in boarding school in the late 60s at a very traditional boarding school in New England during the, you know, the height of the Vietnam War. And also, you know, within an environment that was very conservative. So maybe my first rebellion, other than the rebellion against my parents, was taking a stand and protesting against the Vietnam War, but asking questions about so many things that I was brought up to believe were entrenched and fundamental, foundational to what it meant to be American. I was draftable to the Vietnam War, but I had a high lottery number. But when it came time to. When the opportunity came for me after working in India and the end of my partnership with Mira Nair, I wanted to look further and spend more time in Asia. And I felt this calling. Exactly why did I go to Vietnam? I mean, I really loved being in India and other travel that I had done in Southeast Asia. But I think I was also pulled to Vietnam because I grew up with the horrific backdrop of the Vietnam War on television, eating TV dinners, you know, as a teenager. But to go to Vietnam, it was so transformative because the first trip I made there, I went under the auspices of being a journalist. That's how I got a visa to go. But as soon as I made one trip there, it was clear to me that I had to engage collaboratively in a very different way or I was going to be on very shaky ground as an American. So I sought out dissident writers who were asking questions, and I met one who I formed a collaboration with over three years that was crucial to my experience of Vietnam, and that gave the direction of the work a kind of definition, but also it challenged so. So many of my own assumptions. It was humbling. So along the way after that, I have crossed certain junctures where I've had experiences that got under my skin. American power. It wasn't like I was just sitting in my studio. How can I make a piece of work about our cultural codependency on energy, the broader subject of energy, and the nature of its production in the United States, and the manifestations ultimately, of our consumption of energy? But I had a wonderful opportunity through a commission by Kathy Ryan at the New York Times Magazine, to photograph the death of a town that had been bought out by one of our largest utility companies, American Electric Power in Cheshire, Ohio, and the experience. And that was at a moment where, you know, Kathy was commissioning photographic essays. So I had two trips there, two weeks, and so much got laid out, in a way, through those experiences, but really through the people that I met that were unforgettable. You know, Boots Hearn, a grandmother in her 80s, refused to sell her house, which was in the shadow of this noxious coal fired power plant owned by American Electric Power. Everybody was getting sick, she said, this is where I've lived my life. I don't want to sell those experiences. When I went back and spent time in my studio set in motion the possibility of something larger with property rights. I had had an injury, a calcaneus fracture. I was out of commission for months. But when Trump was elected, the day after the inauguration, there was the, you know, the monumental women's march in Washington. I went with my wife and hobbled, you know, through the streets. And I hadn't felt that swell of critical resistance, you know, layered with this very soulful, very authentic resistance gathering since some of the protests that I had gone to against the Vietnam War. And I had been thinking about what was going down in Standing Rocket, the resistance action against the Dakota Access pipeline. And 10 days later, really just three weeks before it was all shut down by the Trump administration, I had this difficult but very privileged opportunity to go to Standing Rock to make pictures, but maybe even more importantly, to listen to the matriarchal elders that remained, many of whom had been there for a year in the dead of winter, and to basically try to have a better understanding of what life was like for these people who had been so disenfranchised and were carrying this knowledge and history that we had so in a sense, just disregarded and continued to disregard. So that experience in Standing Rock again set the platform for where I could go and look at conflicts around eminent domain, takeover of land by the government or industry, and the resistance actions that were confronting and questioning those land grabs, and to look more globally, more nationally, more continentally at those themes. So in some ways, yes, it was a kind of extension, extension of some of the thinking behind the American Power project, but it was also different because it looked at the land in a very particular way.
One of my favorite pictures from that body of work is the Mount Rushmore picture, which people should. You know, I try not to talk too much on the podcast about specific images because people can't see, you know, it's audio. But I do want to mention that image and urge people, of course, to look at all the work. But this image is really the first picture that I've seen of Mount Rushmore that really makes you want to just burst into tears. I mean, the way you photograph it, it's really, of course, about the place. It's not about the people carved into the. I mean, it is about that, but it feels so much more about the desecration of a place. And of course, with that small little American flag in the bottom left corner of the frame. And it just feels like just such an incredible encapsulation of the idea of this whole project and the stealing of land from, you know, Native Americans, which is not what the whole project is about, but is certainly a through line that sort of runs, runs through. So niche, when you look back at everything you've done. I mean, so much of your practice has sort of centered around the land. And although until very recently, I'm sure you wouldn't have considered yourself a landscape photographer. But, you know, it's always been the presence of people in the land and so often Americans. And when you look back now, do you think, how did. Like, are you surprised that so much of your life's work is sort of centered around the land?
Well, let me step back and just comment on, because I think it relates to the larger, you know, the growth that's so kind of essential. I mean, when I went to Standing Rock and then went on to spend time at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Rushmore was very loaded and very controversial for the Lakota nation. Of course, some of the elders said, don't go. We're not going to talk to you to Rushmore. And some said it's really important that you do go. But having been at rushmore as a 12 year old on a YMCA cross country summer tour, did I have any idea when I was growing up that Rushmore was also known as Six Grandfathers sacred land to the Lakota people? No, that we signed treaties in the 19th century for the Black Hills to go back to the Lakota Nation and then for them to have been taken away. So the experience of going to Rushmore while working on property rights was framed by the, the shift in my understanding of American history. And I think this is also important. You know, it's like as a photographer, we have to take risks and we have to break rules some of the time. I had a permit to photograph at Rushmore on certain days and there was a rain, like a kind of a string of rain days. I was with my studio manager at the time, Ryan Spencer, and I said, look, let's just go to Rushmore and I can scout it at least, because there's nothing else that I'm really going to do today in the rain. So we went and we went in, we left the gear, you know, all covered up in the car. You know, fingers crossed. Nobody was going to interfere with it.
Right.
And there was something about the atmosphere. The fog had settled in. And I took some pictures with my iPhone and I looked at and I said, oh, that's. It clicked, you know, these iconic carved faces by Boglum, the Hungarian sculptor, who was questionably, after having carved Stone Mountain, allied with the Ku Klux Klan, carved these faces in. So I'm sidetracking here, but the water coming down were metaphorically metaphorical tears. And again, I was conditioned to that at the moment, you know, but there was something about that moment. I didn't have a permit. We snuck, you know, we had these big ponchos or whatever, you know, rain jackets and so on. We Somehow, with my 8x10, managed to conceal the gear came in. And I found a way to make those pictures when I could have also just said, oh, no, I have to come back another time. So. But your question, repeat it again because I can try to be specific to it.
What was my question? I don't even remember what my question was.
You kind of broke the rules here.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, no, that's okay. No, no rules. No rules. I did go off on the Rushmore tangent because I really just love that photograph so, so much. But the question was if you thought, you know, when you look back on all the work you've made, if you would have imagined, you know, a long, long time ago that so much of your work was really gonna be dedicated to this idea of us, particularly us Americans in the American landscape.
Well, not really, no. I mean, because, you know, my beginnings, my practice, I learned my practice walking the canyons, the streets of Manhattan, you know, serving an apprenticeship under Winogrand, and really worked with a hand camera really up through the 90s.
I do love your New York City pictures, by the way. They're really so fantastic.
Thank you. Thank you. But I think it was when I began to think about our relationship to what we've been handed and to how extraordinary the American landscape is and to my generation and to having, you know, my year of graduating high school, it was the first Earth Day, and to looking at how poignant environmental concerns were then. I grew up in a town that was so industrialized that fueled by the Connecticut river, but also that then went on to pollute and destroy the Connecticut river because of the way industry was. And so these were things that were kind of brewing. And with American power, though, and beginning to work with a large format camera and looking at the manifestations of American Culture in the landscape, I think. And then, you know, sort of seizing the large format tool which dictates a certain kind of photographic practice that brought me closer to the land as subject and to a commitment to environmental concerns. I mean, my practice and my work as an artist has long worked to wrestle with the didactics, to not fall prey to making work that is singularly messagistic or one dimensional. I've taken my work at times and done things with it as a way to advocate for some of what I feel strongly about in terms of my environmental positions. But I've never set out to make work that is strictly about how I feel and think about things environmental. And I think that that has really served my purpose. I think as I've aged and just continue to evolve, I've really just grown very more deeply interested in things that are unexplainable, that are elemental, that are about our place in this larger, complex and wonderful universe that we are a part of.
Do you think old growth comes out of that? Getting older and feeling connected to.
Absolutely. I mean, it's challenging and humbling to get older. I'm 73, but again, old growth, how did that happen? I mean, it wasn't absolutely an accident. I did this project, New York Arbor, where I did a portrait of the city looking at singular trees in the five boroughs. So I was interested trees in a very particular way. But in the beginning of the pandemic, I met a man, Bob Leveritt, who lives in western Massachusetts, and just went out and took a chance, took some walks with him in pockets of old growth forests in the region from which I come from western Mass. And that got me excited. It was those walks, it was listening to him, his passion, his knowledge, but his unceasing appetite to call attention to these pockets of old growth forests in Massachusetts. And they're small, but people, the scientists, the foresters, they didn't think that this exist. So I want to just say I've worked a lot on trying over the last, really 15, 20 years to understand the value of different projects I've done and to negotiate the path of archive and what has enduring value. What am I still learning from? And also from anyone, even listening to this conversation. Sometimes I ask myself, you know, how does this relate to that and to making sense of it all, but at the same time, digitizing my archive in a way that's faithful to its original analog origins. And so have been building and putting together and thinking about placement of archive and institutional opportunity. And I have been graced just recently, it's not out in the world in public yet, but that a major representation of my life's work, which you could call my archive, is now at the National Gallery in Washington.
Oh, my God. Oh, Mitch, congratulations. Thank you.
It's kind of a nice. It's kind of a nice way, I think, to conclude this conversation because really, in a way to be American, and especially in the era that I was born into, 1952, all of the privilege and opportunity that I have had, and that doesn't mean that I landed some trust fund or an adherence. I've worked for my living throughout. The privilege that we have as Americans to have the freedoms that we have and to have the comfort that we, we have for the larger extended body of my work. To be going to the National Gallery, it's a gift to me, but it's a way for me also to be giving back to the country that I am so grateful to have been born into at the time that I have, that made what I have done possible. And so it's a kind of a thrilling moment because it will also, I think, free me in certain ways to maybe relinquish, you know, a bit more some of those attachments. As an artist, I think that, you know, look, we have to kill our darlings. We have to get past our infatuations and we have to, to work hard to, to take the chances that, you know, that are so essential to the longer arc of what might be possible within a given artist's oeuvre or lifetime. And there's something about the National Gallery, how phenomenal it is that Sarah Greenhow, when she came to the National Gallery, there was no photographic department. The first major acquisition of photography at the National Gallery was the Stieglitz archive through Georgia o' Keeffe after his passing. But there wasn't a photographic department then. It was Sarah Greenhough, who single handedly, really, basically, you know, long after MoMA and the Met and so many of these other institutions, which really, you know, forged photography departments going back to mid century. It wasn't really until the 90s. I don't really, you know, my dating is vague here. Got the National Gallery to make a commitment to build a significant photographic collection and to make it a medium on par with other mediums. And so that also is something that is very meaningful to me and I think will serve the work for generations to come.
Well, really, Mitch, mazel tov. That's incredible. And I love hearing you talk about Sarah. And for folks who don't know, Sarah is such an incredibly important part of the history of photographic art, as are many women in the country who really built up photography departments in their various institutions where they worked. But Sarah is a legend.
I'm going to add one thing. So the I mean, yes, it's actually a department with, you know, that's spearheaded by many women. But the other key curator who's really advocated for this acquisition and who I've worked closely is Diane Wagner. She will be the acting director, chief curator of the department as Sarah formally retired, I think at the end of December. So it's a new era at the National Gallery. They have three shows that I will be participating in, but one that does relate to what part of what we talked about. Well, they will be actually showing that Mount Rushmore picture, but they also will be they'll be presenting a major show called Beneath the Surface that is about extraction and mining in America, historical show that spans really the history of photography of which American power will be featured. So I hope that's a good ending to a lively conversation. Yes.
Thank you. Thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you very much. Really. So, so appreciate it.
Photo Work with Sasha Wolff is a production of the Photo Work Foundation. Executive producer is Sascha Wolff and the associate producers are Taylor Salzbach and Noah Lynn. The show is also produced and edited by me, Michael Chovendalt in a real photo show. Music is by J. Walter Hawks. If you like the show and wish to find out more more about the foundation, please visit PhotoArch foundation and be sure to subscribe and review with all the stars on your listening platform.