In 2000, Mitch Epstein embarked upon a photographic journey to visually narrate the demise of his family’s furniture business in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The project, Family Business, was published by Steidl in 2003 and weaves together his family’s personal struggles with the story of the social and economic challenges facing the once-thriving industrial city of Holyhoke. At the time his father, a 3rd generation Jewish immigrant, was embroiled in a lawsuit stemming from a fire at an abandoned building that he owned which led to the destruction of an entire city block and pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. Epstein’s photographs reduce a lifetime of hard work into a series of quotidian scenes and illustrate the collapse of the(ir) American Dream.
Divided into four sections, Store, Property, Town & Home, the first chapter of Family Business focuses on his family’s furniture store. The American flag, a universal symbol for the promise of the American Dream, is a recurring visual within it. It is first captured hanging prominently behind his father who sits proudly at his desk. The next image in the sequence shows the same scene from the street below, the flag a smaller yet still-significant detail within the 2nd floor window. Flag, 2000 is the final image of the section and, here, it becomes a relic of the past, folded, and wrapped in an ordinary plastic dry-cleaning bag. This progression of imagery perfectly encapsulates the themes at the core of Epstein’s book, highlighting the rippling impact of events and, in turn, the precariousness of life.
