Family Business – Mitch Epstein
Story of the book: Mitch Epstein went back to his home in Holyoke, Massachusetts to study his father’s failing real estate and retail furniture store businesses after a group of bored teenagers set fire to a building in 1999, the book was published in 2003.
Genre: This book’s genre is Photojournalism, presenting the demise of his father’s business through portraiture, landscapes and still life images.
Who is the photographer? Mitchell Epstein (born 1952) is an American photographer. He has created many books throughout his career, his first being published in 1997 and his most recent in 2021. By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York.
The book:
Book in hand: Quite a heavy book, paper’s quite smooth, smells like a book.
Paper and ink: All of the images are printed on matte photo paper, no black and white images, all printed in paper .
Format, size and orientation: The images are a mixture of landscape and portrait orientation, there are 295 pages, including the ones with written work.
Cover: The cover is a plain fabric cover with an image wrap dust jacket which shows products that his father sells in his company
Title: The book is about his father’s business, making the title Family Business literal.
Narrative: He builds his narrative using a mixture of landscapes, still-life images, portraits and stills from interview footage with his dad, mum and staff members of the business. Design and layout: There are no images that go over both pages of the book, most images have a border around them, highlighting them more.
Editing and sequencing: Very often, Epstein places an image of somewhere unclean next to an image of his father or another staff member, highlighting how put together the people of the business are.
Images and text: Most images have text to describe them, and the stills of interview footage have text saying what was said during the interviews.
Add deconstruction of Family Business book:
Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper.
Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both.
Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages.
Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. saddle stitch/swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello
Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping.
Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing.
Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told?
Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative.
Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts.
Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process.
Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others. Use of captions (if any.)
UNDERSTANDING PHOTOBOOKS: