MARK POWER
Festival Speaker
Mark Power’s complex, meticulously crafted images (usually made with large-format cameras) have earned him a reputation as one of the forerunners of British photography. Perhaps best known for his seminal work exploring the far-flung locations esoterically described in the BBC’s iconic shipping forecast, Power has adeptly expressed the peculiarities of social culture in places as varied as the UK, Poland and the USA.
Cromarty. Wednesday 18 August 1993. Variable 3 or less, becoming southwesterly 3 or 4, occasionally 5. Occasional rain later. Mainly good. (From ’The Shipping Forecast’). ©Mark Power
Power studied painting (1978-81) but turned to photography soon afterwards, working on editorial and charity commissions for the next decade. 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 still sit comfortably alongside large-scale commissions in the industrial sector, and in a career spanning forty years he has published 13 books: The Shipping Forecast (1996), a poetic response to the esoteric language of daily maritime weather reports; 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 those landscapes unlucky enough to fall just off the edge of the London A-Z, a map which could be said to define the boundaries of the British capital; The Sound of Two Songs (2010), the culmination of his five year project set in contemporary 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 - in this case 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, Two and Three (2018, 2019, 2021) a project that reflects the current state of the nation while at the same time responding to memories of the cultural imperialism which crossed the Atlantic during his childhood in the British suburbs in the form of music, film and, in particular, television. Begun in 2012 and still ongoing, Good Morning, America will eventually become a five-book set. Meanwhile, a much-expanded and re-edited reprint of The Shipping Forecast was published in 2022.
Page, Arizona. 03.017 (From: ‘Good Morning, America’) ©Mark Power
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.
