10 Aug 2010 00:14:53
Red book not about songs but with sounds
He spend for about five years for his literature work. Who is he? His name is Mark Power and he is from….but who needs to know where is he from. The most interesting what does he do. It is a work about Poland: places often on the outskirts of cities, neglected and overlooked, neither here nor there. Power's Poland looks like a country entirely composed of liminal spaces: desolate housing estates, half-finished building sites, municipal buildings that carry the imprint of Soviet architecture and bureaucracy.
It isn’t simple to pass his vision of Poland, but he did it. It is all in his photographs: the beauty of stillness, silence and muted colours. One could say that Power, a Magnum photographer whose best-known work is The Shipping Forecast – a collection of photographs of the sea areas featured in the BBC's daily weather bulletins of that name – is a melancholic romantic despite the surface realism of his photography. The term "real and imagined spaces" is often applied to Power's work and, as Bienczyk notes, "we find ourselves in what the French call terrain vague, a territory that is undefined, formless, mediocre".
Power doesn’t forget about people who live in that amazing ancient Poland, young and old people, who stare at the camera without giving anything away. Sometimes it can be seems that his photographs haven’t got their own deep, bright, because he can photographs expansive car parks, shopping malls and blocks of flats, we see this every days in all cities from all the word, but as for him it is the new Poland, existing in a suspended state, definably east European but slowly being colonised by the consumerist temples of the west. There are hints of an older past: broken-down churches; dense, uncultivated forests. In one unforgettable image, truncated ventilation pipes lie piled up in the corner of a desolate concrete warehouse. The power of that image, like many in this fascinating book, resides in its suggestiveness, in what it hints at rather than records. A book you spend time with, then, and one whose stories unfold slowly and almost subliminably.
He spend for about five years for his literature work. Who is he? His name is Mark Power and he is from….but who needs to know where is he from. The most interesting what does he do. It is a work about Poland: places often on the outskirts of cities, neglected and overlooked, neither here nor there. Power's Poland looks like a country entirely composed of liminal spaces: desolate housing estates, half-finished building sites, municipal buildings that carry the imprint of Soviet architecture and bureaucracy.
It isn’t simple to pass his vision of Poland, but he did it. It is all in his photographs: the beauty of stillness, silence and muted colours. One could say that Power, a Magnum photographer whose best-known work is The Shipping Forecast – a collection of photographs of the sea areas featured in the BBC's daily weather bulletins of that name – is a melancholic romantic despite the surface realism of his photography. The term "real and imagined spaces" is often applied to Power's work and, as Bienczyk notes, "we find ourselves in what the French call terrain vague, a territory that is undefined, formless, mediocre".
Power doesn’t forget about people who live in that amazing ancient Poland, young and old people, who stare at the camera without giving anything away. Sometimes it can be seems that his photographs haven’t got their own deep, bright, because he can photographs expansive car parks, shopping malls and blocks of flats, we see this every days in all cities from all the word, but as for him it is the new Poland, existing in a suspended state, definably east European but slowly being colonised by the consumerist temples of the west. There are hints of an older past: broken-down churches; dense, uncultivated forests. In one unforgettable image, truncated ventilation pipes lie piled up in the corner of a desolate concrete warehouse. The power of that image, like many in this fascinating book, resides in its suggestiveness, in what it hints at rather than records. A book you spend time with, then, and one whose stories unfold slowly and almost subliminably.
