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Going home again
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Nancy Princenthal
Family Business, by Mitch Epstein, Gottingen, Steidl, 2003; 295 pages, $50.
Spectacular falls taken by corporate titans may deliver an unbeatable combination of schaden-freude and sanctimony, but more life-size tales of humble starts, modest triumphs and hitter defeats still satisfy a distinctively American appetite. The family business chronicled by Mitch Epstein was small-town retail furniture with a sideline in real estate, and his patiently plotted bell curve of its history is worthy of Dreiser.
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Epstein, an internationally exhibited photographer with half a dozen previous books to his credit, is a prodigal son. Raised in Holyoke, Mass., he left for college (the Rhode Island School of Design, then Cooper Union) in 1970, and is now an established New Yorker. He was never tempted by the prospect of working at the hometown store that was founded by his grandfather in 1911 and run by his father and aunt, ultimately drawing in one of his two brothers as well. But when it became evident that the business would not survive, Epstein--himself a new father--returned to Holyoke to document its demise. Of course, the distance implied in "documentation" collapsed in a nanosecond, happily for the production of a complicated, nuanced body of work.
The publication that resulted is a big, beautiful photo book, but it also contains a fair amount of text, including a narrative written by Epstein, interviews with family members and employees, and transcriptions of dialogues between various participants. Epstein's story begins in August 1999, when two Holyoke kids set fire to a property owned by his father, Bill. The fire spread, taking a 19th-century church with it, and engulfed an entire block. Afterward, the church officials sued, threatening Bill with ruin. Mitch arrived in October with a 4x5 camera, stayed briefly, and returned frequently with additional, more adaptable equipment over the next year or so. A settlement of the lawsuit averted financial disaster, but the liquidation of the store was inevitable, and it closed in March 2000, trailing questions. For starters, Epstein asks, "How had my father, once owner of the largest furniture and appliance store in western New England and the former Chamber of Commerce Businessman of the Year in 1974, ended up a character out of an Arthur Miller tragedy?"
Epstein fils recorded not only the store's slow decline, but also the ongoing emergency that is housing in an economically broken town. Long a center for papermaking, Holyoke experienced a severe industrial downturn starting in the 1970s, along with a major influx of low wage Hispanic labor. In the book's most gripping vignette, Epstein's 82-year-old father administers a grueling (for everyone) real estate triage when tenants illegally reoccupy a building temporarily condemned after yet another fire. Without heat or gas on a bitter winter night, the rogue residents nonetheless resist distant relocation. "A small caravan of tenants--televisions and bedding slung across their shoulders trudges across snow-covered Main Street to Dad's neighboring building," Epstein writes. In this nearby property, other illegal tenants are displaced to accommodate the refugees. Fury and despair abound. It is after 10 at night before all are settled, and father and son retire to Friendly's for dinner--the only place in town still open.
But the respite is brief. The next night, the Epsteins get a call about an injury suffered by Mitch's youngest brother, who is mentally impaired and a resident in a state facility in Worcester. They drive over the following morning, Sunday, after Bill has already spent some time at work. When they return to Holyoke, he goes back to his office. Willy Loman, by comparison, was a slouch.
Some of the visual material in the book is archival. There are family photographs of the Epstein clan's early days in western Massachusetts; a newspaper clipping from 1930 heralding founder Israel Epstein's plans for lakeside cottages; handwritten notes from a 1963 sales conference, emphasizing enthusiasm and courtesy; a worn advertising brochure that seems to be from roughly the same time, the illustrated goods bathed in a lurid golden light that suggests prosperity and domestic warmth.
Epstein's own photographs, though, tell most of the story, and they are eloquent. The book's first section, "Store," begins with a full-frontal image of a big, empty, deep-rod velvet sofa, close behind which is the upside-down reflection of a sign hand-lettered in fuchsia paint, the visible fragment of which reads "forever." A broken-hearted Valentine of a photograph, it is, formally, both open and suffocatingly shallow. Yet like most of the work in Family Business, it is also an emotional canyon, lined with family history all the way down.
Color is key to psychological dynamics throughout Epstein's photographs, as in an image that looks down, past yellowed walls, to a basement showroom, where ranks of reclining armchairs sit on worn carpet, all in shades of undersea blue--a lost Atlantis of unused furniture. Often the palette is generic mid-century, running to fleshy pink and swimming pool aqua. When these dominate, especially where the compositions are most minimal--two spent fluorescent tubes leaning in a corner of an empty room, a battered leather suitcase on a bare mattress--Epstein comes closest to bathos. But much of the work has a rueful humor. One image reveals that pseudo-Rococo painting is available by the yard; another catches a shopper, hefty and happy, checking out the Matissean merits of a big, soft armchair.
