CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/12/2021

'Mitch Epstein: In India' is NEW from Steidl

Featured photographs, captioned “Café, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1983) and “Rekha, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1984) are reproduced from In India, the new release from Steidl collecting noted NYC photographer Mitch Epstein’s photographs made over eight trips to India 1978–1989—many of which were made while working with (and married to) filmmaker Mira Nair. “I was working in an extraordinarily complicated culture with the great privilege of a dual vantage,” Epstein writes. “Through my marriage and intimate family life, I gained an Indian perspective—never fully of course, but more than if I’d been a tourist. At the same time, because I was American, I was largely unencumbered by the complex and politically fraught codes of caste, class and religion that ruled most Indians’ lives.… It is impossible to encapsulate in a sentence or two what India taught me, but I can say that my life there gave me a humility I hadn’t learned as a white middle-class man born in postwar America. I learned it from photographing and meeting people throughout that vast country, but also from collaborating closely with the Indians participating in Mira’s films.… In India, I began crossing borders, entering lives and worlds I didn’t understand to make work about the resulting exchange.” Launching Tuesday, September 14 with a signing at Dashwood Books.