Imagine fine-art photographer Mitch Epstein on a sidewalk in Poca, West Virginia, surrounded by police cruisers, receiving a lecture from an FBI agent. Such was the state of paranoia in 2004 when Epstein traveled to West Virginia to photograph the Amos Coal Power Plant. He was working on his long-term project, American Power, in which he sought to examine America’s production and consumption of energy in the early years of the new millennium.

It was far from the first time Epstein had been questioned while working on American Power. The project began in 2003 when The New York Times Magazine sent him to Cheshire, Ohio, where American Electrical Power was buying residents out of their land and relocating them. Epstein photographed Beulah Hern, an octogenarian who refused to leave her home. Hern felt so harassed by the power company that she set up security cameras and armed herself with a handgun. Epstein says he could relate: he’d been warned off by police and AEP’s private security, and told that if he trespassed on AEP land he would be arrested.

Epstein says it was the first time his role as a photographer was so heavily questioned in the United States, and it reminded him of what he’d experienced when photographing in communist Vietnam 20 years earlier. “I was unnerved,” Epstein recalls. “It stayed with me and I realized that this subject of energy was an extraordinary opportunity to look at the larger American landscape, and to consider it in the broad sense of how it was a mirror for American society at this point in our history.” The fact that he was also denied access to the plant, even with press credentials from The New York Times, also spurred him on. “When something is kept at bay like that, I want to pursue it,” he says.

Over the next five years, as Epstein examined energy’s influence on America, he explored new techniques in his picture- and printmaking. The project also inspired him to rethink the way he disseminates his work so that it might reach beyond the fine art photography audience and achieve a larger impact. Although Epstein has shown some prints from the project during the past couple of years, his new book, American Power, out this month from Steidl, will be his first presentation of the entire body of work.

His printmaking, and indeed the sheer size of his prints allowed him greater control over the photographs. Whereas previously he had waited to complete projects before printing his images, for American Power he printed photographs as he made them, which influenced his decision to switch from a 4 x 5 to an 8 x 10 camera. Working with large-format cameras and wall-sized prints forced him to refine his technical prowess, he says, but it also provided him further tools “to create emphasis in ways that you didn’t have the possibility of creating emphasis before,” both while making photographs and at the printmaking stage. “I’m often punctuating my pictures with small details,” he says. “With a large picture, you can rely on the acuity, the rendering of a small detail in such a way that it will still hold its place in relationship to the whole.”

In his image of the Hoover Dam, for instance, the impressive concrete structure occupies the lower left corner of the frame, while Lake Mead fills the center of the image, giving prominence to “the bathtub ring” on the canyon walls that surround the lake. The receding lake—a result of drought and the diversion of water to Las Vegas—shows that “water itself has become more valuable than the electricity it can produce,” Epstein writes in the book’s essay. “It’s challenging to find ways to let the visual evidence for these histories to be realized in a way that is not simply illustrative,” Epstein says. At the top of the photograph a band of sunlight illuminates a ridge overlooking the dam.

Another photograph considers an Iowa wind farm from atop a grain elevator in a farming hamlet. The wind turbines stretch into the distance, while the community occupies the foreground, symbolizing the town's new co-existence with renewable energy sources built into the landscape.

Composing interesting photographs of coal power plants, oil refineries and even wind farms without falling into clichés could have been difficult. Asked if he had to be careful not to bash the audience over the head with symbolism, Epstein says, “The success of a picture really depends on a kind of balance between the primary theme that’s central to the picture and a number of other sub-themes. When I photograph something that’s very dramatic and rich with meaning, I take care to find a way to see it that is not in service to a contrivance that it might carry because it is rich with meaning or a cliché.”

Epstein did internet research to identify sites around the country where he would find coal plants; oil infrastructure and refineries; nuclear power plants, waste facilities and regulatory offices; hydro-electric dams; and wind farms.

Using these sites as starting points, Epstein would circle the surrounding landscapes looking for compelling vantage points from which he could build photographs that stretched beyond strict documentation and considered larger issues like consumption. Through this working method he let the project “spiral and become expansive,” he says. “The challenge was how much to allow it to expand without it falling in on itself and losing it’s core.”

Epstein rarely got permits was regularly harassed by law enforcement and private security guards who he says would often abuse Homeland Security mandates to deter him. Epstein says he worked with a kind of anxiety, which forced him to consider carefully where he chose to make pictures. “The process was hampered and interrupted,” he says, “and maybe that was also empowering in the same way that making these large prints compelled me to be more careful.”

Epstein also broadened the projects scope. Photographs of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and receding glaciers consider energy’s role in climate change. Epstein also became interested in the relationship between power and politics, visiting the clean-coal-sponsored Democratic Convention in Denver, and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, which took place in an arena named for the energy company Xcel.

Epstein says he hopes the project will cause audiences “to reconsider one’s relationship to some of the choices that are at hand as regards energy, the politics of energy, the very notion of what we as a society have come to take for granted—that our resources until now have been largely limited, and that bigger is better.” In an effort to expand the audience for the work, Epstein and his wife, writer Susan Bell, have created a public art concept for which they’re seeking funding. Epstein also plans to create a Web presence for the project, and he scaled down the size of the book to make it lower-priced and therefore more accessible. Epstein says he is also interested in taking the work back to some of the communities where he made it. “I think that would be meaningful in places where I was told, ‘You can’t make these pictures,’” he says.