!!! mark power !!!

At the invitation of Georgia's Minister of Culture, ten photographers were invited to spend two weeks traveling the country in pursuit of a specific theme. My chapter, 'Industry and the Economy', gave unprecedented access to some remarkable sites, and led to a number of chance encounters along the way.

Born 1959, Harpenden, UK. As a child Mark Power discovered his father's home-made enlarger in the family attic, a contraption consisting of an upturned flowerpot, a domestic light bulb and a simple camera lens. His interest in photography probably began at this moment, although he later chose illustration - specialising in life drawing and painting - instead. He (accidentally) 'became a photographer' in 1983, and worked in the editorial and charity markets for nearly ten years, before he began teaching in 1992. This coincided with a shift towards long-term, self initiated projects which now sit comfortably alongside a number of large-scale commissions in the industrial sector. To date Power has published five monographs: 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 documents 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; and The Sound of Two Songs (2010), the culmination of his five year project set in contemporary Poland. In 2007 he tried his hand at curating. Theatres of War featured the work of five artists whose work is concerned with contemporary conflict and surveillance. It opened at the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakow, Poland in May. Mark Power joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002, became an Associate in 2005, and a full Member in 2007. Meanwhile, in his other life, he is Professor of photography at the University of Brighton, a city on England's south coast where he lives with his partner Jo and their children Chilli (b.1998) and Milligan (b.2002), although currently they are based in Krakow, Poland.

mark power