JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by GOST Books (here). Clothbound hardcover, 317 x 245 mm, 166 pages including 15 foldouts, with 73 color reproductions. Includes an essay by the artist and a plate list. In an edition of 1500 copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Roughly five years ago now, the British photographer Mark Power published the first book in what would be an ambitiously planned five book series chronicling his travels through America. With the divisions of the Trump presidency as a backdrop and the disillusionments of an outsider raised on American myths simmering in his brain, Power’s Good Morning, America (Volume I) (reviewed here) was filled with contradictions and muted pessimism, delivered with expansive compositional precision. To be sure, Power offered a conflicted vision of America, often moody and unsettled, with hints of disheartened gloom and outright misery, but his pictures were consistently elegantly composed and meticulously crafted. This created a tension that gave the first book a charge of energy, with beauty and near ugliness tightly interwoven.
Soon after the first volume was published, our collective world dropped into the depths of the pandemic, and two years passed before Power returned to the US to continue his monumental project. He was now faced with a slightly different America, with Biden as president and a less heated politcal atmosphere, but with stubborn divisiveness still hiding underneath a somewhat calmer exterior. Good Morning, America (Volume IV) is largely filled with photographs made in 2022 and 2023, with a number of pictures weaving back a few years to interlock with the geographic and thematic arcs of the previous volumes. His recent journeys took him through the Midwest (Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska) and out further to Colorado and Wyoming, up to Alaska, and then back to the East coast (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and upstate New York), but the book liberally jumps to other American destinations, including California, Louisiana, Texas, Montana, and several other states, so a bit of artistic license has been taken with the absolute strictness of the chronology.
One of the things that was noticeably absent from most of the images in Volume I was the presence of actual identifiable people. Power’s large format compositions were acutely controlled, and there were a few shadowed bodies, silhouettes, and otherwise covered forms to be found if we looked carefully, but for the most part, there didn’t seem to be room, even in the most sweeping and spacious of images, for the unruly personalities of everyday Americans. In Volume IV, Power’s America is somewhat more populated with families, residents, and community members, and there are even a few portraits included in the flow of imagery. Was America different, and had the people come out from their hunkered down hiding places from five years back? Or was Power the one who had changed, now more willing to engage with and include the strangers he ran across?
The evidence is actually inconclusive, as aside from a portrait of a woman sitting in a car in Rhode Island and a misty street scene with two people standing in the middle of an empty intersection in Alaska, all of the rest of the photographs that include people were made in Power’s previous trips to America, reaching back to before the pandemic, so the chronology of the edit (and the resulting conclusion about what the people might mean) is muddled. What we can say is that people decorate more of Power’s scenes in Volume IV, a few of them looking like they might have been posed there for effect by Jeff Wall or a time-traveling Romantic painter. Some of the standout images with figures include a woman in pink boots sweeping up in Baltimore; a man pushing a shopping cart through a parking lot in South Dakota; a man pumping gas near a pink sunset in California; another man bending over to pick up something near a Family Dollar store in Maine; a fireman kneeling outside a burning house in Texas; and a gaggle of kids hanging out (and playing with the mailbox) in a dirt yard in New Mexico. Each picture is a precisely crafted set piece, with the human presence activating the otherwise static arrangement.
Even with more people milling around, it’s hard to entirely come to the conclusion that Power’s mood (or the country’s mood for that matter) was or is more optimistic in some manner, as there are still plenty of images in Volume IV that bend toward the quietly bleak. Several photographs offer us views of things wrapped up: a covered sign, a diorama draped in plastic, various tarps pulled over mounds, and something tied up in white underneath an overpass. In a similar vein are the things that are closed or destroyed: the food pantry at the church, the road near the factory, a flattened house after a wildfire in Colorado, and a deer (or elk?) who has been reduced to a disembodied hoof. Even the sign at the Warsaw restaurant in Holyoke, MA, is now just WAR.
Power has an undeniable talent for looking at a scene we might normally consider ugly (or at least one we might pass over without much of a thought) and slowing down enough to see something striking in that forgettable grimness. A brown puddle near some frothy falls in Rochester, NY, is unexpectedly lovely, as is the twilight pink sky over a Navajo power station in Arizona. He does this again and again with a consistency that seems almost implausible, turning dark underpasses, overgrown trees, back alleys, a stream choked with logs and dirty sheets, a tree filled with shoes over a skate park, and even a sagging couch on a junk strewn front porch into something approaching beauty.
Even when Power is ostensibly documenting a particular American place, his compositions are often built around geometric patterns and color stories. The dense repetitions of hotel balconies in Anchorage, AK, are later matched by the soot-stained broken windows of a facade in Kansas City, MO and the moldy green and black rot covering the windowed side of a factory in Connecticut. Color drives Power’s images of a shadowed pink building in Oregon, a weathered yellow house in Connecticut, a green brick wall outside a VFW hall in Montana, and the golden echoes of a wall and parked car in Wichita, KS, but each is also a carefully controlled study of geometric form. Several other images drift toward more gestural mark making, as seen in tire marks in a rooftop parking lot, layered circles in dirty dusted snow, and squiggles of bright yellow sun glare across greenhouses.
Part of any story of America is its scale, especially in the West, and Power takes advantage of that muscular vastness in a series of three panel foldouts that allow him to spread his compositions out further. The most successful of these photographs are the ones that lean into that American bigness. Power’s image of snowy whiteness in Oregon is a particular knockout, with the tiny farm in the foreground and the white windmills turning in the distance set against the expansiveness of the subtly mottled sky. He has similar success with a wide view of the confluence of rivers in Idaho (anchored by a sinuous curved road in the foreground), a watery mountain vista in Alaska, a classic center road and rails view of the emptiness of Gilmore City, Iowa, and even the depressing immensity of a cattle feedlot in Kansas. The physical action of folding out the images also amplifies the sense of drama, with each picture so big it requires a special kind of attention.
Given the consistent quality of Power’s images across this entire sprawling project, it’s obvious that he deserves to be better known than he is, particularly here in America. But I still think he’s missing much of the positive energy to be found in this nation, in its can do spirit, its entrepreneurialism, its opportunities, and its communities, but perhaps we find what we think we’re looking for when we’re out on the road in a foreign land. There’s an image of a flag in Good Morning America (Volume IV) that seems to capture some of this perceived dissonance. To some, the upside down, dirt covered tile flag might be an overly easy emblem for a nation on the decline, but perhaps we can read this very same picture in another way. Yes, things are in some cases upside down in today’s America and there is plenty of unswept dirt that might imply we’re not paying enough care and attention, and those might indeed be fair conclusions. But underneath, that flag is solidly and resolutely embedded in that tile, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Collector’s POV: Mark Power is represented by Magnum Photos (here). Power’s work has little secondary market history, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
