Curator Gregory Harris on Mark Power's new book, Good Morning, America (Volume Two)
Mark Power
"Now that everyone in the developed world seems to own some form of camera, a different space has opened for documentary photographers. It's a space free from specific events, where there are different expectations, where it is first and foremost about ideas. Now we can all take pictures, with varying degrees of ability, it's what we do with our cameras that counts."
- Mark Power
Mark Power was born in the UK in 1959. He studied painting (1978–81) but turned to photography soon afterwards, working on editorial and charity commissions for the next decade. His complex, meticulously crafted images, usually made with large-format cameras, have earned him a reputation as one of the forerunners of British photography. He began lecturing at the University of Brighton in 1992, eventually becoming the Professor of Photography before relinquishing his teaching post in 2017.
His position at the university coincided with a shift towards long-term, self-initiated projects which sit comfortably alongside large-scale commissions in the industrial sector. In a career spanning 40 years, he has published 14 books: The Shipping Forecast (1996), a poetic response to the esoteric language of daily maritime weather reports (a much-expanded and re-edited reprint was published in 2022); Superstructure (2000), a documentation of the construction of London’s Millennium Dome; The Treasury Project (2002), about the restoration of a nineteenth-century historical monument; 26 Different Endings (2007), which depicts landscapes that fall just off the edge of the London A–Z map; The Sound of Two Songs (2010), the culmination of a five-year project set in Poland following her accession to the European Union; Mass (2013), an investigation into the power and wealth of the Polish Catholic church; Die Mauer ist Weg! (2014), about chance and choice when confronted, accidentally, with a major news event (here, the fall of the Berlin Wall); Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment (2016), a collaboration with the poet Daniel Cockrill about pre-Brexit England; Icebreaker (2018), which documents two Finnish ships operating in the Bay of Bothnia; and Good Morning, America, Volumes One (2018), Two (2019), Three (2020) and Four (2023), a project that reflects the state of the nation while responding to memories of the cultural imperialism that crossed the Atlantic during Power’s childhood in the British suburbs in the form of music, film and, in particular, television (begun in 2012 and still ongoing, this will eventually become a five-book set).
Power’s work has been seen in numerous galleries and museums across the world and is in several important collections, both public and private. He joined Magnum as a nominee in 2002, becoming a full member in 2007. He lives in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with his wife Jo and their dog Kodak.
