Ben Lifson wrote in his Village Voice review:"He stands between artistic tradition and originality and makes pictures about abandoned rocking-horses and danger, about middle-age dazzled by spring blossoms, about children confused by sex and beasts.

Reviewing an exhibition of the Vietnam pictures for Art in America, Peter von Ziegesar writes, "In a show full of small pleasures, little prepares one for the stunning epiphany contained in Perfume Pagoda…Few photographers have managed to make an image so loaded and so beautiful at once.

"[8] In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father's two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire.

[2] In reviewing the book, Nancy Princenthal wrote in Art in America that "his patiently plotted bell curve" of the history of the family business "is worthy of Dreiser".

Epstein made a monograph of the American Power pictures (2009), in which he wrote that he was often stopped by corporate security guards and once interrogated by the FBI for standing on public streets and pointing his camera at energy infrastructure.

In his Art in America review, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein "grounds his images…in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty.

"[11] In an essay for the catalogue Contemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection: Appropriated Landscapes (2011), Brian Wallis wrote,"Epstein has made clear that his intention is neither to illustrate political events nor to create persuasive propaganda.

Rather, he raises the more challenging question of how inherently abstract political concepts about the nation and the culture as a whole can be represented photographically…But equally significant is the unique form of documentary storytelling that he has invented in American Power—colorful, sweeping, concerned, intimate, honest.

"[12] In The New York Times, Martha Schwendener wrote:"What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein's ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography.

[15][16] "Epstein's trees extend the photographer's longstanding interest in mankind's disruption of our environment," writes Rob Slifkin,[17] "...his new work typically addresses this theme of human engagement with nature without recourse to the inclusion of actual people.