What is American power?  That is the question Mitch Epstein has been asking since 2003 when he first started his photography project known as What is American Power? Epstein set out on a journey to find out the answers from various people in the US and throughout the world by photographing various settings and asking people for their viewpoints.  Epstein’s photographs question the power of nature, government, corporations, and mass consumption in the United States.

His goal is create awareness of our relationship with energy production and consumption and how they take a toll on our economy, security, health, and natural resources, as Epstein stated:

“When we understand more about the realities of American power, we can make wiser choices about energy through conservation and civic action.”

While Epstein believes that American power is about our addictive relationship with non-renewable sources and mass consumption, the answers from people whom he inquired about the meaning of “American power,” varied.  Some believed that “American power” is about greed, freedom or innovations:

American Power is our ability to innovate, invent, and deploy on a grand scale.  The future of American Power is what we dream, design, and create, bounded by imaginations, physics, and economics.

– Jesse Svoboda, information technology manager, Cincinnati, Ohio

American power is when we, as a people, proclaim our freedoms in a Bill of Rights.  When power itself is something to be shared and not just protected.  When difference is celebrated and not feared.  When prejudice is transcended and poverty overcome.  American power is when we believe that anything is possible.

– Maurice Berger, cultural historian, New York, New York

American power is the enforcement of American greed.  We talk about promoting the interests of others, but it’s our own self-interest that governs what we do.  We are addicted to self-aggrandizement, to busily establishing the myth of our superiority, calling ourselves “the Greatest Nation on Earth”.  We talk about peace, but we always seem to be at war as if constantly testing the limits of our power.  The language that characterizes our peace initiatives – “Desert Storm”, say, or “Shock and Awe”, amply demonstrates our crude notion of power, just as the term “collateral damage” is equally crude in its easy, abstract dismissal of the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people.  American power strikes me as a kind of sickness.

– Mark Strand, poet, New York, New York

I remember my first visit to the US, arriving in NYC from Europe, being struck by the huge vehicles, the massively illuminated city, my hotel room with its AC on full and the TV talking to itself.  I looked out the window and knew that the AC and TV were switched on in 10,000 empty hotel rooms across NYC, it all seemed so immodest, unnecessary and unsustainable.  I knew back in Europe my children were turning the lights off when they left a room and turning the tap off between cleaning their teeth.

– Nick Turpin, Photographer, London, UK

What are your thoughts?  What is American power?  Please post your comments.  I will share mine tomorrow and everyone else who shares theirs.

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