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Epstein, Mitch : Family Business: Photographs By Mitch Epstein

Gerhard Steidl Druckerei Und Verlag, Gottingen, Germany, 2003

ISBN 3882439130

First Edition / First Printing. As New in As New Dust Jacket. 295 pages. Collection of color photographs. One of the most important photography books of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only that sold out shortly after publication. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Mitch Epstein and Gerhard Steidl: Oversize-volume format. The book weighs 4 pounds. Brown cloth boards with metallic-silver titles embossed on spine, as issued. Photographs and text by Mitch Epstein. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper in Gottingen, Germany to the highest standards. In pictorial DJ with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Presents Mitch Epstein's "Family Business". A visual-cum-textual narrative. It is the photographer's deeply personal account, in images and a few words, of The American Dream-Become-The American Nightmare. "Mitch Epstein was 48 and living in New York when his mother called him about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12-year-old boys had broken into his father's boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts and just for the hell of it, set it ablaze. The fire spread, engulfing a 19th-century Catholic church, then a whole city block. The $15 million lawsuit brought by the church against the senior Mr. Epstein unravelled his life. Faced with the family crisis, Mitch went home to help, possessed by the question of how his father, owner of the largest furniture and appliance store in New England, and a former 'Chamber of Commerce Businessman of The Year' recipient, ended up as a character out of an Arthur Miller tragedy. An epic work about the demise of a Jewish-immigrant dynasty. Traces the parallel fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital" (Publisher's blurb). The brilliance (and poignance) of the book lies in its dispassionate (though never cold) rigor, in the face of its harrowing subject. Epstein combines photographs with video clips to re-create a whole world, now gone for good. Divided into four chapters ("Store", "Property", "Town", and "Home"), he also incorporates storyboards, archival material, and his own text. The result is a photographically-based, mixed-media "graphic novel" that shows us how the American Dream can be upended and ruined by one prank. An absolute "must-have" title for Mitch Epstein collectors. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Mitch Epstein. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped in-page. This title is a great photography book. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. 315 color, 5 black-and-white plates. Mitch Epstein's "Family Business" was selected as one of the greatest photography books in "The Photobook". One of the most brilliant photographers of our time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MITCH EPSTEIN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 3882439130.

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