I recently picked up the newly published fourth volume of Mark Power's projected five-volume work, Good Morning America. Being a fan of Power's previous work, particularly The Shipping Froecast, I bought the first volume when it came out back in 2019. At the time I wasn't really sure what to make of the book. Perhaps my mistake was to start at the back where Power has a short essay.
For as long as I can remember I've wanted to explore America, an ambition fuelled by a legion of TV shows that crossed the Atlantic in the 1960’s. As a young and impressionable child I devoured The Man From UNCLE and The Fugitive but it was the westerns evoking a landscape altogether removed from the congested English suburbs surrounding me that I loved the most: Bonanza, The High Chaparral, The Virginian and in particular Casey Jones, the adventures of a middle-aged railroad driver putting the world to rights.
I am of a similar vintage to Mark Power and I grew up on a similar diet of Americana, adding only Alias Smith and Jones, though I believe that was from the early 1970’s. These television shows evoked an imagined America for me also, and perhaps I expected Power’s childhood vision to more closely match my own. Instead, turning to the photographs my impression was of a bleaker, harsher imagining of the country than these shows ever conjured up for me. (Though perhaps the contrast with my expectations renders the pictures gloomier to my eye than they might otherwise appear.)
Part of the difficulty of assessing volume one was that it is only the first instalment of a planned five-volume set, so the images gathered there, taken across the country between 2012 and 2018, were only a fragment of the whole. Also, as Power notes, many of the earlier pictures were drawn from his archive and not specifically taken with this project in mind, while most of the images in later volumes were. The challenge for Power, as for any photographer who trains his or her lens on the US, is that the ‘decline of America visually expressed’ genre is heavily oversubscribed and even more heavily clichéd. On first glance, not a few of Power’s images in volume one seemed to fall into this genre and clichés are largely unavoidable. Of course, this was just my reading of the images, for Power himself did not seem entirely clear what his project is about.
I never begin a project with a thesis I want to prove; if I did that I’d surely limit myself denying myself all sorts of opportunities. I try to remain open-minded and, certainly, the longer I spend in America the more I learn…but the more confused I get as well.
Elsewhere, though, Power has been much more explicit about the thinking behind the project. In an interview with 'In Sight' published in the Washington Post Power described the work as ‘endlessly shattering these romantic, imaginary images that exist happily in my head.’ So, not so much in search of that imagined America of his youth, but more in search of its dissolution. Power also explicitly connects the project to the ‘decline of America’ genre but argues that ‘the decline has been going on for decades'. Contrary to Power's assertion in the above quotation, this is a thesis, and while Power may not be intent on his photographs proving that thesis, clearly the choice of subject and the choice of images for the project is going to relate to that thesis.
My initial reaction to volume one was that in among the many good images there were too many more that left me cold. Yet, as I have returned to the book over the years I have found some of those latter images revealing much more than I saw at first look which, I suppose, is the sign of a good photograph.
Power’s biggest challenge is that in producing a book that aims to represent the American every day in colour he is following in the footsteps of the likes of Joel Sternfeld, William Egglestone and, above all, Stephen Shore. Interviewed by the Guardian in 2007 Shore said,
To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognise it as a photographic possibility — that is what I am interested in.
Power is trying to see the photographic possibilities in the ordinary, but anything less than a truly exceptional image or project is always going to struggle when set alongside Egglestone or Shore, no matter how provocative the thesis.
At first I was undecided whether I should persevere with the series. When volume two was released I went back and forth over whether to buy it. In the end I did so, and then I picked up volume three when it was released. COVID-19 restrictions on travel to the US complicated Power’s project leading to a four-year gap between volumes three and four. My initial impression of volume four is more positive than that of volume one. Whether that reflects a shift in the mood of Power's photographs or a greater appreciation of the overall work on my part I'm not sure. Perhaps it's a little of both. I'm looking forward to spending more time with the photographs in volume four, and may post a review here at some point.
There is a very good article by Power on the project with plenty of example images from Volume one on the Magnum website.
Publisher website with more sample images
Photographer website with multiple galleries of photographs from the project
Volumes 1 and 2 are difficult to find now. Volume 3 is still available and volume 4 is widely available. All volumes are published by UK specialist photobook publisher GOST Books.
All photographs ©Mark Power
“Yet, as I have returned to the book over the years I have found some of those latter images revealing much more than I saw at first look which, I suppose, is the sign of a good photograph.”
I have long been an admirer of Mark Power. His photographs often appear commonplace, at first viewing. But the more I look the more I am drawn in. And their honesty is powerful.
Living in North America since age 12, I have long since lost any sense of romanticism in regards the American (and Canadian) West. Power’s images of feedlots in the prairies, as pictorially perfect as they are, speak to one part of the truth of this continent.
Thank you for another great piece.