A Language of New York

A Language of New York explores what it means to be a New Yorker, in public and private. In 1995 Mitch Epstein began making pictures in the city, as it underwent a seismic cultural and physical shift. The gritty neighborhoods and sassy unself-consciousness of the 1970s, when Epstein had first moved to New York, were disappearing. Signs of the future were encroaching: surveillance cameras, the normalization of gun violence as a virtual reality game in Times Square, and Disney's gentrification of the old theaters and strip clubs on 42nd Street. Epstein wanted to photograph New York in this strange liminal space, between past and future. A year into the project, he began making black-and-white portraits of his inner circle in their homes or workspaces as an intimate counterpoint to his color photographs of street life. A Language of New York examines the city's recurrent self-cannibalizing into a new upcycled landscape, and the urban relationship between public and private. Both gimlet-eyed inquiry and loving homage, it describes an incredibly resilient city prone to cooperation, protest, consumerism, and creativity in the extremes.