New York City, in Between Rocks and Clouds

In the winter of 2014, the photographer Mitch Epstein was recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. Along with the ability to move around, inspiration seemed to have left him, and his photography had halted completely. “Every couple of days,” he writes, “I worried about how I’d keep working over the next year.” An essay by the artist Robert Smithson about Frederick Law Olmsted eventually shook the stagnancy. Smithson, who considered Olmsted not only a landscape architect but an earthworks artist, wrote that Olmstead used “rocks to communicate ancient time”; Epstein had recently abandoned the idea that his own time could be wasted, even while languishing on the couch, and Smithson’s ideas resonated. Soon enough, Epstein was in Central Park, not yet free of a boot cast, investigating a new project: photographing rocks. To counterbalance this ancient and solid subject matter, he wanted something that “would convey the city’s flux”; a friend suggested that he turn the camera up, to the clouds floating above the city. Thus began Epstein’s project “Rocks and Clouds,” made throughout 2014 and 2015 in all five boroughs of New York City. It is a continuation of his previous series, “New York Arbor,” for which he spent two years making portraits of trees throughout the city.