Old Growth, made by American photographer Mitch Epstein from 2020 to 2024 in forests across the United States, portrays ancient trees and the interdependent ecosystems that sustain them.
The project grew from Epstein's preceding series Property Rights, whose attention to contested land and environmental destruction led him to consider what remained of North America's precolonial forests. During the early COVID-19 period, forest researcher Bob Leverett introduced him to old-growth pockets near Epstein's childhood home in western Massachusetts. Epstein then traveled through Washington, California, North Carolina, and Utah, seeking sequoias, redwoods, bristlecone pines, bald cypresses, and Pando, a clonal aspen organism composed of thousands of stems. Epstein describes the work as a meditation on trees that survive across multiple human lifetimes and as an appeal to conserve wildlands for their own sake.
Individual trunks, tangled roots, bark, foliage, and layered stands alternately fill the frame or recede into dense spatial depth. Large trees often extend beyond the picture's boundaries, making their scale difficult to measure, while elevated and upward-looking viewpoints loosen the viewer's sense of ground. Diffuse, low-contrast light reveals moss, fire-darkened surfaces, and fine variations in leaves and wood. Most views contain no people. In Congress Trail, Sequoia National Park, California (2021), however, a passerby who unexpectedly entered the frame appears small beside a fire-damaged sequoia. The wider body combines color and black-and-white photographs, with atmospheric greens and browns giving way in some images to the tonal structure of trunks and branches.
Epstein worked slowly with a tripod-mounted 8 × 10 field camera, returning to some sequoia and coast-redwood sites when weather, light, or vantage did not yield a photograph. Exhibition prints were produced as archival pigment prints, reaching up to 72 inches in one dimension.
The first dedicated exhibition, at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York in 2024, presented nine photographs with Forest Waves, a video of Berkshire woods across four seasons. Later that year, Old Growth joined American Power and Property Rights in Mitch Epstein: American Nature at Gallerie d'Italia in Turin, accompanied by a bilingual Skira catalogue. Intesa Sanpaolo commissioned part of the project, and Steidl announced an 80-image monograph. In 2025, the National Gallery of Art received Sequoia National Park, California IV (2022) as a gift.
