Exhibitions: Extended Family: Contemporary Collections

This photograph is part of Mitch Epstein’s series Family Business, which traces the decline of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a once-prosperous industrial town, through the example of his own family’s waning fortunes. The series’ central character is Epstein’s aged father, whose downtown furniture store went bankrupt and whose rental properties deteriorated. Dad, Hampton Ponds III, a monumental and vulnerable portrait, shows the artist’s father partly submerged in water and with an adhesive bandage on his arm; it is an image about frailty and the difficulties of aging. Like others in the series, the photograph transcends its context of small-town America and becomes an emblem of the fragility of life.