In 2003 the photographer Mitch Epstein embarked on what he calls "a strange kind of tourism: energy tourism." His aim was to document, with his large-format camera, the countless sites of energy production in the United States and the ways in which energy is consumed, as well as the costs of those endeavors to society and the natural world. In American Power, his lens captures the unsettling tranquility of a green backyard in West Virginia, over which loom the cooling stacks of a coal-fired power plant. Hoover Dam, once an emblem of our mastery over nature, has become, with its "bathtub ring" around sinking Lake Mead, a witness to depletion. Epstein was particularly affected by his time photographing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, including a ravaged yard in Biloxi, Mississippi (above). As an indirect consequence of global warming, he writes, "Katrina was the ultimate symbol of how we, as a society, had failed; how our rapacious, ‘supersize-me' culture had led to catastrophe." While Epstein's liner notes are strongly worded, the images themselves-measured, with subtle lines and subdued colors-speak volumes with their understatement. Their final effect is almost elegiac: a dignified tribute to our country's vast power and to the landscape it is quietly corroding.