MITCH EPSTEIN (B. 1952)

"I was 48 and living in New York when my mother called me about the fire. On a windy August night in 1999, two 12 year old boys had broken into a boarded up apartment building owned by my father in Holyoke Massachusetts and, for the hell of it, set it ablaze...The fire prompted me to make a series of large format photographs and a video installation about my father's life to better understand the path he had traveled. Crucial to his story is that of Holyoke itself. The commercial center died in the 70s, its customers gone to the new supermall. Holyoke became a crack-riddled, arson-wrought town. A recent wave of immigrants turned the formerly "white" downtown Hispanic. The culture clash resonates in the relationship between my Jewish American father and his Puerto Rican tenants and employees.

My father and his generation of men were and still are driven to fulfill an American Dream that had its epiphany in the fifties: Work hard=Do well. This project asks, when and how did that equation fail-for him, but also for a whole country of American Dreamers?"

-Mitch Epstein, from Family Business