DC’s National Gallery of Art Acquires the Life’s Work of Mitch Epstein

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) has become the primary site for the work of Mitch Epstein. By acquiring 1261 photographs, the Washington DC institution now serves as the preeminent archive for a figure considered one of the most influential American photographers of the last fifty years.

Spanning five decades of work from Epstein’s early pioneering colour street photography in the 1970s to later thematic series such as Family Business, American Power and Property Rights, the acquisition instantly transforms the NGA’s holdings of contemporary photography while placing Epstein within a lineage of artists whose work has been collected in depth rather than selectively.

The scale of the gift is striking. Donated by Epstein and his wife, Susan Bell, it includes master sets, portfolios and large-scale exhibition prints. The donation also reflects the unique role the NGA has carved out within US culture over the past three decades; less concerned with accumulating isolated photographic masterpieces than constructing broad, historically-layered bodies of work capable of sustaining future exhibitions, scholarship and reinterpretation.

Epstein himself repeatedly returned to this idea of breadth during his conversation with The Art Journal. “There’s something very different about the National Gallery of Art to most of the other contemporary institutions that collect and exhibit photography,” he says, citing both its public accessibility and its longstanding policy against deaccessioning works. “It’s owned by the people. It belongs to us. We don’t pay admission. And so that also changes the framework for accessibility. It means you don’t have to be of a certain class to gain admission to the museum.”

Mitch Epstein, Congress Trail, Sequoia National Park, California 2021, 2021, inkjet print, image: 53.34 x 35.88 cm, sheet: 60.96 x 50.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Gift of Mitch Epstein and Susan Bell) © Mitch Epstein. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Founded by the banker and statesman Andrew Mellon in the 1930s and completed in 1941, the NGA was designed as an American counterpart to Europe’s great national galleries, historically projecting a different set of values from more contemporary-focused institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York by giving precedence to connoisseurship over fashion and depth over wide accumulation. Rather than assembling an encyclopedic collection, the museum built its reputation through highly selective acquisitions intended to carry long-term art historical weight.

“For my work to be in conversation with the key institutional gallery of art is a privilege,” Epstein says. “But it's also important for the work, seeing the ways in which it can be activated differently by the company that it keeps, the conversations that get stimulated.”

That philosophy runs deep within the institution’s history. Although the NGA only formally established its photography department in 1990, the origins of the collection date back to Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1949 donation of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘Key Set’, an unparalleled body of photographs intended to represent the full evolution of her late husband’s career. A core tenet for the department became the commitment to archiving photography in comprehensive breadth, prioritising the artist's full narrative over the display of detached, iconic works. This became foundational to the department under Sarah Greenough, who retired earlier this year after more than four decades at the museum.

“The most important thing was Sarah’s, and now Diane’s, passionate commitment to building a collection,” Epstein says. “Sarah had an understanding early on that collecting photographers’ work in breadth was important for the institution, which isn't the case elsewhere. Having that depth of representation was appealing to me.” 

The civic dimension of open access has always been central to the NGA’s self-image. Positioned on the National Mall alongside the institutions of federal power, the museum was conceived not as a private trophy house but as a democratic national collection projecting soft power.

Epstein’s gift appears motivated by something broader than prestige or legacy management. He resists any suggestion that the move stemmed from thoughts about securing posterity. “I still feel youthful,” he laughs at one point, dismissing the notion that he has spent years plotting the final resting place of his archive. Instead, he describes the relationship as something that evolved gradually through conversations first with Greenough and, later, with Diane Waggoner, the museum’s acting head and curator of photographs.

Mitch Epstein, Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004, 2004, printed 2025, inkjet print, image: 72.39 x 92.71 cm, sheet: 81.28 x 101.6 cm (National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mitch Epstein and Susan Bell) © Mitch Epstein. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

The resulting archive is also more multifaceted than a straightforward transfer of decades-old material from storage into institutional hands. Much of the work entering the NGA has been remastered, rescanned, re-edited and newly fabricated in recent years. Epstein speaks at length about revisiting projects over the last two decades to create a digital archive, refining scans, rethinking edits and producing new pigment prints with greater tonal control and longevity than earlier chromogenic processes allowed.

That process complicates simplistic ideas of the photographic archive as fixed historical evidence or the market-driven primacy for vintage prints made close to the time of capture. Particularly in colour photography, where output technologies have evolved radically in recent years, Epstein suggests that newer prints can often more accurately realise the intentions behind older work than vintage prints produced under the technical limitations of the time. Several large-scale master sets were specifically fabricated for the NGA acquisition, including an extensive set of prints from American Power produced at 30x40 inch.

“Even when they do group exhibitions that are survey or theme-driven, they draw from their collection,” he says. “So they make a sincere effort to acquire work that will go on view. That means that there's this active engagement with what gets collected and is there to draw on for exhibition.”

In many ways, the NGA’s photography collection evolved by absorbing the medium into the museum’s older culture of connoisseurship. Vintage prints, tonal control, sequencing, provenance and material quality increasingly became treated with a comparable seriousness traditionally afforded to Old Master paintings or sculpture. 

Those practical questions around editing, sequencing and printmaking connect directly to a larger conceptual tension running through Epstein’s work: its relationship with documentary history itself. Although his photographs are deeply rooted in American social and political realities – including environmental threat, extraction, protest, suburban expansion, immigration, postwar capitalism – Epstein resists being described simply as a documentarian. When I suggest his work might function as an “alternative history” of contemporary America, he pushes back on the phrase, wary of its associations in an era of historical distortion.

“I don’t think of my work as historical document,” he says. Instead, he describes it as “an interpretive chronicle” existing “in conversation with American history”.

His work frequently moves between observation, symbolism and personal narrative. In Family Business, his meditation on his father’s failing furniture and real-estate business in Massachusetts, several apparently spontaneous scenes were in fact carefully orchestrated using objects and spaces from his father’s life. The project eventually led toward American Power, his long-running examination of energy infrastructure and environmental consequence across the US.

Seen now, American Power feels uncannily prescient. Begun during the George W Bush era, its photographs of coal plants, electrical grids, extraction landscapes and uneasy suburban development resonate differently in an era increasingly defined by climate crisis, AI-driven energy demand and renewed political denialism around environmental collapse. Epstein himself draws links between the work and a longer American mythology of ‘Manifest Destiny’, an idea first coined to justify colonial expansion and referencing his interest in nineteenth-century frontier photography and industrial landscape imagery – also held within the NGA collection.

Mitch Epstein, West Side Highway, New York City 1977, 1977, printed 2025, inkjet print, image: 35.88 x 53.34 cm, sheet: 50.8 x 60.96 cm (National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mitch Epstein and Susan Bell) © Mitch Epstein. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Yet even as the National Gallery effectively historicises Epstein’s work through institutional acquisition, the photographer himself remains resistant to fixed interpretations. Again and again during our conversation, he returns not to closure but to a strange sense of freedom involved in relinquishing control over work that has occupied him for decades. “The hardest thing for me was letting go,” he says. Yet the act of relinquishment has also become “the most liberating thing”, he says, allowing the work to take on “a life of its own” beyond the artist’s direct control.

For Epstein, then, the NGA acquisition does not represent an endpoint. It is a transfer from an individual artist’s thought process and practice into public historical memory. The institution now becomes custodian not simply of photographs, but of a sprawling, unresolved argument about America itself.

Mitch Epstein’s photographs feature in Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, the NGA’s exhibition that runs until 23 August