CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/7/2018

Nature demanded more… Mitch Epstein: Rocks and Clouds

"I have tried to learn something about nature's vernacular," Mitch Epstein writes in Steidl new release, Rocks and Clouds, "not by going to a remote forest, but by looking harder at the rocks, clouds, and trees in my city. Conceptual and technical skills I'd developed over forty-five years were inadequate to the task. Nature demanded more: that I wait and wait and wait, without knowing exactly what for; that I recognize failure as the inability to wait, rather than the inability to get what I wanted -- or thought I did. Sometimes waiting meant standing next to my camera for hours wondering if the weather would change in my favor; sometimes it meant hours studying a rock formation to figure out how I might animate it; sometimes it meant sitting on my couch staring at the movement of my dog's belly as she breathed. Waiting always meant that no matter how well I'd plotted my time and employed my intuition, my fate was at the mercy of the unexpected."