Mitch Epstein: Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 - Hardcover

These pictures, made in the seventies and eighties, offer a window onto the beginning and breadth of Mitch Epstein's career. Most of these photographs are previously unpublished - culled from a body of work that addresses the theme of Americans at leisure.
Ordinary things here startle, while the extraordinary appears at perfect ease in the world. Teenage girls abandon a baby to fondle a snake; children sleep ass to the wind on a car in an open campground. People stake their private ground in public, if only for a moment - during which Epstein's camera finds them.
Gesture gives many of these pictures their pulse: tender hand, strained shoulder, swiveled hip. It isn't the fact of thirteen year olds smoking that shocks, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes.