Lucia Bell-Epstein’s moment of youthful rebellion was improbably conventional. She took the LSAT. “I wanted to have this safe path that was a rejection of the community I grew up in,” she says. The only child of the photographer Mitch Epstein and the writer and editor Susan Bell, Bell-Epstein was raised off the Bowery, among New York’s creative elite.
In her early years, she watched her parents make things every day, and followed them to gallery openings in Chelsea on Thursday nights. It was a childhood full of adults: her godfather was Mikio Shinagawa, the late owner of Omen Azen, the SoHo institution favored by Patti Smith, Karl Lagerfeld, and Yoko Ono. The photographer Tina Barney, who introduced her parents, served as an honorary godmother.
