Buena Vista, Colorado (1988)

Lots of people retire to Colorado, among them, it seems, the “Giants in the Earth” in Edvart Rolvaag’s classic novel. (At one point, the book pines for the “Rocky-ocky Moun-tains” because “directly behind those mountains lay the Pacific Ocean. . . . They had no winter on that coast.”) Mitch Epstein is an East Coast guy, but his picture-taking brings him out West occasionally. In 1988, on a trip along the Continental Divide from Montana to Mexico, he discovered Buena Vista and the room in its town hall that had been turned over to two model-train hobbyists.

For them, the appeal of re-creating a Colorado mining town in miniature was the excuse to lay track in every direction, including right down the main street. Besides the pop-up Mt. Rushmore of the hobbyists themselves, there are many details in this picture to tickle the viewer: the cookie-cutter miners’ shacks beside the man on the right, the way the smoke from the industrial chimneys is painted on the diorama background, and the dreamy look of self-satisfaction on the man’s face to the left.

Epstein must have been pleased, too, at seeing the sign on one of the town’s shops that reads “Photographer.”