Family Business.

20th Anniversary Edition. Photographs by Mitch Epstein. Edited by Susan Bell.

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2024. 288 pp., 321 illustrations, 8½x11x1".

In the summer of 1999, two boys barely in their teens were so bored that they started a fire in a boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The fire spread and engulfed an entire city block. Mitch Epstein’s father owned the building and was sued for $15 million, which he didn’t have. Epstein’s father also owned a once successful furniture store that now faced liquidation. Family Business is an epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty. It traces the fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital in four chapters: “Store,” “Property,” “Town” and “Home.” As Andy Grundberg wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “This book elegantly and eloquently traces the decline of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a once prosperous industrial town, through the poignant example of Mitch Epstein’s own family’s declining fortunes and psychological disintegration.”
Surprising, hard-hitting and haunting, the book includes photographs, video storyboards and stills, interviews and dialogues. In Family Business, Epstein has invented a unique mixed-media novel whose conceptual ambitions are matched by its fearless humanity. This is the 20th anniversary edition of a seminal photobook, which quickly became a model of complex visual storytelling.

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Cat# DU889H Hardbound $75.00 (9783969993361)
Pre-order this item, due June 2025. More Info

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